In the City life was unbearable by reason of the awful noise of the stone-paven streets, now happily superseded by asphalte. Papers were dear, but in all parts of London there were old-fashioned coffee and chop houses where you could have a dinner at a reasonable price and read the newspapers and magazines. Peele’s, in Fleet Street, at the corner of Fetter Lane, was a great place for newspapers and reporters and special correspondents. Many a newspaper article have I written there. Then there were no clubs, or hardly any, and such places as the Cheshire Cheese, with its memories of old Dr. Johnson, did a roaring trade far into the night. There was a twopenny post for London, but elsewhere the charge for letters was exorbitant and prohibitory. Vice had more opportunities than now. There was no early closing, and in the Haymarket and in Drury Lane these places were frequented by prostitutes and their victims all night long. A favourite place for men to sup at was Evans’s in Covent Garden, the Cider Cellars in Maiden Lane, and the Coal Hole in the Strand. The songs were of the coarsest, and the company, consisting of lords and touts, medical students, swell mobsmen, and fast men from the City, not much better. At such places decency was unknown, and yet how patronised they were, especially at Christmas time, when the country farmer stole away from home, ostensibly to see the Fat Cattle Show, then held in Baker Street. Of course there were no underground railways, and the travelling public had to put up with omnibuses and cabs, dearer, more like hearses than they are now.