American bowls were much the fashion in those days and the ground floor of the club was turned into a bowling alley, which has now been parcelled off into two billiard rooms. A good many of us regretted the noisy old alley which was a meeting-place for the happy little crowd that laughed there every night, none gayer, none more bright, none more instinct with the joy of life than the brilliant young Prince himself. Such was the Marlborough Club in the seventies. Downstairs skittles, fun and frolic; upstairs whist and the seriousness of the catacombs. Hartington, James Clay, Batchelor, St. Albans, Owen Williams and others, all as solemn as schoolmasters; the Prince himself leading the gravity up above as he had been leading the gaiety below, and playing a capital rubber. There are very few of the old set left and as one of the survivors wrote to me the other day, upon the death of another, “the leaves are falling fast.” One afternoon—it was 1872, but I prefer to tell the story here—I was all alone in the club when Sleeman, the then steward of the club, came into the room surcharged with importance and told me that the Emperor of the French, who was a member, was down below, and asked permission to bring in the Duc de Bassano, who was his Lord Chamberlain. It was his first visit and I ran down to receive him, took him upstairs, and established him in an arm-chair with the evening paper. After a while he called me up and began questioning me as to my profession and the various posts at which I had been. We had a long talk, for he had to kill time waiting for his train. Louis Napoléon, whose faculty of silence is a matter of history, was, when he chose, a very agreeable talker, and his conversation was pointed by a certain dry, sardonic humour accentuated by his rather saturnine appearance. He was looking miserably ill, his face ashen grey, and his lack-lustre eyes significant of the pain by which, for years, he had been tortured; his figure was bowed and aged—obviously a man waging an unequal war with disease. He talked a good deal about the missionary question in China and Corea, upon which he was thoroughly well posted, and he also spoke with a great deal of feeling about the murder of his men, the sailors of the _Dupleix_, in 1868. After half an hour’s talk with him I understood the charm which he exercised over men and women when he chose to do so. I also understood that when Kinglake fired all the arrows of bitterness at him there could be but one cause—a woman. * * * * *