The brothers Cooper were not very much in evidence at either house. They presented none of the characteristics of the typical licensed victualler. Indeed, they were the most highly respectable looking men to be seen in any walk of life—rosy-cheeked, white-whiskered, of solemnly benign expression, and dressed with an amount of elderly foppishness which, in a drab mid-Victorian age, was quite delightful to behold. Up the Thames—somewhere in the Hampton Court direction, if I remember aright—where their home was, the neighbours who were “not in the know” supposed them to be stockbrokers of a sporting turn of mind. But if the Coopers took no ostensibly active part in the management of the Albion, they were most effectively represented by their head-waiter—the incomparable Paunceford. Even now, across the years, one can see his beaming face, his head held a little to one side—a propitiatory pose—his twinkling eye, his mellifluous and insinuating tone as he proceeds from box to box, half an hour, or even an hour, after closing-time, with the half-plaintive, half-humorous admonition of “Time, gentlemen, if you please!” Paunceford and the Albion should both have been made immortal. For when the Albion closed its doors, another race of waiters had arisen, and Paunceford’s occupation was gone. The last time I passed through Russell Street, Covent Garden, a merchant from the neighbouring market was running the premises as a store for fruit and vegetables. I wonder whether the ghosts of those departed who once made merry within ever appear to the eminent salesman, flitting behind his mountains of green-stuff, or playing phantom hide-and-seek among his boxes of oranges and bananas.