The Flybynights had no house of their own; they merely occupied a room on the basement of the Orpheus tavern,--a dull sombre old room, with big couches and lounges covered with frayed leather, with a smoky old green-flock paper, and with no ornament save a battered old looking-glass in a fly-blown frame. Occasionally roisterers new to town, on their way to the big concert-room of the Orpheus, where they were to be enchanted with the humour of Mr. Bloss's "Dying Cadger's Lament," or the pathos of Mr. Seeinault's "Trim-built Wherry," would in mistake push open the green-baize door leading to the Flybynights sanctum, and immediately withdraw in dismay at the dinginess of the room and the grim aspect of its occupants. That grimness, however, was only assumed at the apparition of a stranger; when the members were alone among themselves, perfect freedom from restraint was the rule. And if, on the next morning, the jurymen who listened with awe to the withering denunciations which fell from the lips of the learned counsel for the prosecution,--the bank-directors who nodded approval to the suggestions of certain shrewd financiers,--the noble sitters who marked the brows of the artists engaged on their portraits, "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,"--nay, even the patients who gazed with eager eyes to glean something from the countenances of the physicians then clutching their pulses,--had seen counsel, financiers, artists, and physicians on the previous evening at the Flybynights, they could not have recognised them for the same men. The fame of the club spread; anecdotes and _bon-mots_ ran round town more quickly, and were better received, when they had the Flybynight stamp. It was rumoured that O'Blank and Macaster, the great authors, were occasionally to be seen there in the flesh, conversing like ordinary mortals; heavy swells found out that it was open as late as Pratt's, and asked each other, in elliptic phraseology, "Whether 'twasn't good kind place, eh? met 'musing kind fellahs there; made laugh'n, that kind thing?" But though they made various attempts at election, they never got beyond an occasional visit to the club; friendly attempts to smuggle them in as members were dead failures; and at every ballot, generally held at midnight, the strident voice of Rupert Robinson, author and dramatist, could be heard asking, at the mention of any candidate's name, "Who is he? what can he do? what has he done?" questions which, unless satisfactorily answered, caused the immediate pilling of the pretender to association with the Flybynights.