On the day after my arrival in town I was present at the State Opening of the Great Exhibition of 1862, the second--and apparently the last--of the international exhibitions held in London. Its interest was sensibly diminished by the fact that, in consequence of the death of the Prince Consort, neither the Queen nor any member of her family was present. The Duke of Cambridge, then in the prime of his manhood, took the leading part in the ceremony, and he had as his supporters Prince Frederick of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor Frederick, and the Prince of Hesse. We were not so clever in those days at arranging spectacles as we have since become, and, shortly before the hour fixed for the opening ceremony, a good deal of confusion still reigned upon the daïs set apart for the official notabilities. I was amused to see Lord Granville, who was, if I remember aright, chairman of the Royal Commissioners, broom in hand, vigorously sweeping the carpet in front of the State chairs only a few moments before he had to rush off to receive the Duke of Cambridge. My most vivid recollection of the opening ceremony is the singing of Tennyson's fine ode, composed for the occasion. I can still recall the cadence of the first lines as they fell upon my ears. A visit to the House of Commons, where I remember hearing speeches from Lord Palmerston and Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and where I gazed with longing eyes upon the occupants of the reporters' gallery, fills up my memories of this first sight of London. I might, indeed, have included in them some reference to Sothern, the actor, who was then at the height of his glory in the famous part of Lord Dundreary. But it was at Newcastle, not in London, that I actually made Sothern's acquaintance. No actor ever made a single character so famous as this part of Dundreary was made by Sothern. When he came to Newcastle on his first provincial tour I met him, and spent some pleasant evenings with him after the play. He was a man of refined speech and good social gifts. His besetting weakness, as I learned even then, was that addiction to practical jokes which, on more than one occasion in his subsequent career, involved him in unpleasant situations. One of his favourite tricks was to select some portly and self-important gentleman whom he saw passing along Piccadilly or Oxford Street, and, rushing up to him, to claim him as his dearly loved but long-lost uncle. The more strenuously the victim denied the relationship, the more eloquently pathetic and indignant became Sothern. A crowd always collected quickly, and more than once the police were summoned to relieve the putative uncle from the presence of his unwelcome nephew.