I originally planned this chapter to cover A German Night amid the two German colonies of Great Charlotte Street and Highbury; but I have a notion that the public has read all that it wants to read about Germans in London. Anyway, neither spot is lovable. I have never been able to determine whether the Germans went to Highbury and the Fitzroy regions because they found their atmosphere ready-made, or whether the districts have acquired their atmosphere from the German settlers. Certainly they have everything that is most Germanically oppressive: mist, large women, lager and leberwurst, and a moral atmosphere of the week before last that conveys to the mind the physical sensations of undigested cold sausage. So I was leaving Great Charlotte Street, and its Kaiser, its _kolossal_ and its _kultur_, to hop on the first motor-'bus that passed, and let it take me where it would--a favourite trick of mine--when I ran into Georgie. I have mentioned Georgie before. Georgie is one of London's echoes--one of those sturdy Bohemians who stopped living when Sala died. If you frequent the Strand or Fleet Street or Oxford Street you probably know him by sight. He is short. He wears a frock-coat, buttoned at the waist and soup-splashed at the lapels. His boots are battered, his trousers threadbare. He carries jaunty eye-glasses, a jaunty silk hat, and shaves once a week. He walks with both hands in trousers pockets and feet out-splayed. The poor laddie is sadly outmoded, but he doesn't know it. He still lunches on a glass of stout and biscuit-and-cheese at "The Bun Shop" in the Strand. He stills drinks whisky at ten o'clock in the morning. He still clings to the drama of the sixties, and he still addresses every one as Laddie or My Dear. He hailed me in Oxford Street, and cried: "Where now, laddie, where now?" "I don't know," I said. "Anywhere." "Then I'll come with you." So we wandered. It was half-past seven. The night was purple, and through a gracious mist the lights glittered with subdued brilliance. London was in song. Cabs and 'buses and the evening crowd made its music. I heard it calling me. So did Georgie. With tacit sympathy we linked arms and strolled westwards, and dropped in at one of the big bars, and talked.