The café at which we were invited to sup with Sandow must have occupied the site, or have been very close to it, once devoted to the squalid orgies of “The Judge and Jury.” Elsewhere in these rambling reminiscences I have alluded to ineffaceable memories which one would willingly expunge. Through life one looks back on experiences which one would gladly forget, but cannot. They cling like burrs, and pursue like an evil odour. My recollection of “The Judge and Jury” furnishes such an experience. I visited the place once. Nothing on earth could induce me to pay it a second visit. The entertainment was in two parts. The first consisted of a mock trial presided over by “Baron Nicholson.” Before this libidinous old president, “barristers,” duly arrayed in wig and gown, called witnesses, male and female of their kind, and proceeded to examine and cross-examine with an amount of licence and obscenity that set up in the hearer a sort of moral nausea. The “Baron’s” charge to the jury was a tissue of ribaldry and bawdry which to me seemed simply awful, but which appealed to the habitués of the squalid hall. The trial at an end, Nicholson’s bench was removed, and behind it was seen to be a stage-curtain. To the strains of a piano this was drawn up, and on a revolving platform were discovered the figures of some women representing groups from the classics. The goddesses of Olympus were more sadly aspersed by this exhibition of shameless flesh than had been the Bench and Bar of England by Nicholson’s travesty. As the platform revolved, the women, with nothing on save their pink fleshings, smirked and leered at the audience in front. Needless to say, the figures in this exhibition of _posé plastique_ were neither young nor beautiful. The pink fleshings could scarcely keep in place the sagging charms of a mature Venus, the lank limbs and scraggy neck of Diana. . . . Faugh! London knows better now. CHAPTER XVI MINE EASE AT MINE INN