changes of the weather, to wind, rain, hail, sleet and snow, which must have been very trying, especially at night, when the bedrooms had to be entered by the light of a candle, difficult to keep burning, whilst the wind was driving rain or snow into the gallery. Remember also that the roughly paved yard and the stables surrounding it were full of noises, not only during the day, but all the night through. There were the horses kicking, coaches and waggons constantly coming in through the gateway, or going out, stablemen, coachmen, carters shouting, horses being harnessed to carts, and other vehicles starting early in the morning on their journeys, and the rest of the sleepers in the bedrooms along the galleries must have been sadly interfered with. Nor can the smell arising from the stables and from the manure heap, all confined within the well formed by the surrounding buildings, have added to the comfort of the guests staying at the inn. As the bar of the inn frequently was in the yard, the noises made by its visitors, and the quarrels they occasionally indulged in, and which often would be settled by a fight in the yard, were not calculated to promote sound sleep. But our ancestors were not so particular in these matters; even aristocratic quarters of London were given up to dirt and rowdyism. In St. James’s Square offal, cinders, dead cats and dogs were shot under the very windows of the gilded saloons in which the first magnates of the land—Norfolks, Ormonds, Kents and Pembrokes—gave banquets and balls. Lord Macaulay quotes the condition of Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a striking example of the indifference felt by the most polite and splendid members of society in a former age to what would now be deemed the common decencies of life. But the poorest cottage and the meanest galleried inn-yard look well in a picture. Be glad that you have not to live in either. But a few generations ago, as we have pointed out, tastes and habits were different, and even now there are old fogeys so wedded to ancient customs that they still patronize the dark boxes yet found in some antiquated taverns, which afford room for four or six customers, who have to sit upright against the perpendicular backs of the boxes, lest they slide off the twelve-inch-wide shelves on which they have to perch and disappear under the table. Strange were the customs of the days referred to. The people seemed to live in taverns, physicians met their patients and apothecaries there, lawyers their clients, business men their customers, people of fashion their acquaintances. ’Even men of fortune,’ says Macaulay, ’who might in their own mansions have enjoyed every luxury, were often in the habit of passing their evenings in the parlour of some neighbouring house of public entertainment,’ in the company of ill-bred, loud talking, roisterous and spittoon-patronizing smokers. Johnson declared that the tavern chair was the throne of human felicity.