Some of us are yet alive who recollect the little saccharine poems, the plaintive little sonnets, the--well, yes, to speak the truth--the washy three-volume novels which were composed in that sturdy old building and dated thence. Sturdy outside, but lovely within. Such furniture: white satin and gold, black satin and red trimming; such pictures, and statues, and busts; such looking-glasses let into the walls at every conceivable place; such hanging baskets and ormolu clocks, and Dresden and Sèvres china; such Chinese fans, and Indian screens, and Turkish yataghans and Malay creeses; such books--at least, such bindings; such a satinwood desk, at which the Countess penned her inspirations; such a solemn-sounding library clock, which had belonged to Marie Antoinette; such lion-skins and leopard-skins for rugs; such despatch-boxes with the Della Cruscan coronet and cipher; such waste-paper baskets always littered with proof-sheets! The garden! never was anything seen like that! It was not much more than half an acre, but Smiff, the great landscape gardener, made it look more like a square mile. Delightfully rustic and English here, quaintly Dutch there, Italian terraced a little lower down, small avenue, vista broken by the fountain; might be a thousand miles away from London, so everyone said. Everyone said so, because everyone came there. Who was everyone? Well, the Grand-Duke of Schweinerei was someone, at all events. Ex-Grand-Duke, I should have said, recollecting that some years before, the people of Schweinerei, although by no means a strait-laced people, grew so disgusted at the "goings-on" of their reigning potentate, that they rose in revolt, and incontinently kicked him out. Then he came to England, where he has remained ever since, dwelling in a big house, and occupying his spare time with fighting newspapers for libelling him in a very blackguard and un-English manner. His highness is an elderly, short, fat man, with admirably-fitting wig and whiskers of the Tyrian purple. He has dull bleary eyes, pendulous cheeks, and a great fat double chin. He is covered all over with diamonds: his studs are diamonds; he wears a butterfly diamond brooch on the knot of his white cravat; his waistcoat-buttons are diamonds; his sleeve-links are diamonds; and he resembles the old woman of Banbury Cross in having (diamond) rings on his fingers, and probably, for all the historian knows to the contrary, on his toes.