Alike in winter fog and summer haze, I grew to know and love it, and those that may be called its dramatis personae, especially its tatterdemalions, the long procession led by Jack Sheppard, Dick Turpin and Jonathan Wild the Great. Inevitably I sought their haunts—and they were not all gone in those days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, whither Mr. Tom Jones repaired on his arrival in town, and the White Hart Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell in with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions about Leicester Fields and Russell Square sacred to the memory of Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and Becky Sharp; where Garrick drank tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled with Sir Richard Steele. There was yet a Pump Court, and many places along Oxford Street where Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden and Drury Lane. Evans’ Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and The Cock and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for refreshment in the agreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver Goldsmith and Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly glasses amid the punch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew London when it was still Old London—the knowledge of Temple Bar and Cheapside—before the vandal horde of progress and the pickaxe of the builder had got in their nefarious work. III Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred—by chance, I am ashamed to say—to Mrs. Scott’s letter of introduction to her brother. The address read “Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines, Jermyn Street.” Why, it was but two or three blocks away, and being so near I called, not knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be. I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me was exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially and we had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife and I were invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no one to tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be connected with the School of Mines. It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of Tyndall and another by the name of Mill—of neither I had ever heard—but there was still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be a literary man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on Education some four years agone by a writer of that name; a certain Herbert Spencer, whom I rightly judged might he be. The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed—the Huxleys, I took it, must be well to do—the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however, I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he loved music and wished to hear Mrs. Watterson sing, especially Longfellow’s Rainy Day, and left the others of us—Huxley, Mill, Tyndall and myself—at table. Finding them a little off on the Irish question as well as American affairs, I set them right as to both with much particularity and a great deal of satisfaction to myself.