The honeymoon was spent partly at Brussels, partly at Paris, and then the newly-married couple came home to their house in Saxe-Coburg Square. Fifteen years ago, just before the first Great Exhibition (_the_ Great Exhibition! we who had _gelebt und geliebt_ before '51 know how poor the other one was in comparison to it!), the tract of land whereon Saxe-Coburg, Gotha, Coleraine, and Dilkington Squares, Adalbert Crescent, and Guelph Place now stand, was known as Grunter's Grounds, and was tenanted by an honest market-gardener, who found a very remunerative market in Covent Garden for his cabbage cultivation. But Hodder, the great builder, marked the army of luxury marching rapidly west; and knowing that quarters must be found for it, saw in Grunter's Grounds the exact place for the erection of those squares, crescents, terraces, and places, of which his architect, Palladio Hicks, had so elaborately shown the elevation on paper, but had erected so few. Mr. Hodder discovered that the nurseryman was in the last eighteen months of his lease, and that Grunter's Grounds belonged to a charity, the trustees of which were always quarreling among themselves. This was enough for Hodder; he soon wormed his way into the confidence of some of the trustees; and eventually succeeded in getting the renewal of the lease refused to the market-gardener, and the ground made over to him, on building lease, at a very cheap rate. Now do you wonder why Mrs. Hodder drives one of the most stylish equipages in the Park; or why, in her amateur theatricals, she manages to get hold of all that extraordinary histrionic genius, which, by an odd concurrence of events, always accompanies the possession of a clerkship in the Treasury? That was a splendid speculation for Mr. Hodder. There are thirty-six houses in Saxe-Coburg Square, for instance; and each of them lets at 320_l_. a-year. They are all, as Mr. Thackeray said of the Pyramids, "very big," and very ugly; great gaunt stuccoed erections, bow-windowed, plate-glassed, and porticoed after the usual prevalent pattern, with a small square courtyard looking into a mews behind, and Mr. Swiveller's prospect, "a delightful view of--over the way," in front. But they let wonderfully; it is the thing to live in that quarter; and hangers-on to the selvage of fashion, clerks in public offices, who have married into aristocratic poor families, and suchlike, will be found bargaining for a ghastly little hole in Adalbert Crescent or Guelph Place, when they could get a capital roomy house at Highgate or Hampstead, with a big garden, in which their "young barbarians" could be "all at play" from morning till night, for far less money. Mr. Schröder's house was furnished very expensively, and, considering all had been left to the upholsterer, in not bad taste. The dining-room was in light oak, carved high-backed chairs in green morocco; a large massive round-table in the centre, with half-a-dozen swinging moderator-lamps