But I have wandered some few perches from Anderton’s. I return. My last visit to that hotel was with the late Dr. Tanner, a Member for Mid-Cork. His brother had committed suicide there by injecting morphia. The deceased gentleman, Dr. Lombard Tanner, was an extremely jovial and good-looking Irishman. He had got into entanglements—not of a financial, but of the _other_ kind—and he saw no way out but this. I had been an intimate friend of his. But he sought advice neither from friends nor relatives. The memory for me will always remain gruesome and ineffaceable. For before the inquest the coroner’s officer handed me a letter-card addressed to me by poor Lombard, which was written, as to the first part, just before he commenced the injection, and, as to the last part, ending blurred and incoherent, while the drug was taking effect. He wished me to accept his sword and certain other effects which he had left at his room, in St. James’s Place, St. James’s, and to bid me farewell! This is, I confess, a sad note on which to close a chapter, but even the most jocund periods have their short sharp moments of tragedy. CHAPTER XIII DE MORTUIS FLEET STREET is haunted by the ghosts of dead newspapers. At midnight they flit—in white sheets, of course—out of the doors and windows of old offices in the thoroughfare itself, and in the tributary lanes and streets and courts that flow into it. You may—if you have a good reliable imagination—catch the glimmer of their silent passage as they scurry back to their long homes. Poor sheeted dead! once so full of life and hope and confidence, but cut down untimely, and fated to revisit the scenes of their short but well-meant labours! When my time comes to go, I shall not be able to leave my children much money; but I can—and will—leave them a lot of good advice. Should one of them determine to try his fortune in Fleet Street—a course which I should deplore—I would advise that devoted child of mine to keep a diary. Had I adopted this precaution, I should now be in a position to fix an exact date to every incident and anecdote related in these chronicles, and to record a hundred others which have escaped my memory. And for the purposes of this particular chapter I should be in a position to give the names, dates, and careers, of all the dead newspapers I have known during their brief stay on earth. In the absence of any record, and having no desire to engage in research at the British Museum, I should roughly compute the number of publications started in my time and since died the death at between forty and fifty. I confine myself in this estimate to papers founded during the twenty years of my Press experience, and issues with which I had some intimate or remote personal connection. And here permit me to give another crumb of advice to that unfortunate boy of mine who may develop journalistic leanings. I would say to him: