The other man remaining behind said to me very seriously, “I hope his Lordship didn’t trouble you, sir?” I said that on the contrary he had behaved like an English gentleman, all except the clothes. “Well,” said the keeper, “he’s not properly a Lord as you may say; he’s an Australian gent. But he’s a Lord in a manner of speaking, because Parliament did make him one. As for the clothes--ah! you may well ask! But we durstn’t say anything: the doctor and the nurse says it soothes him since his money trouble. But _I_ say, _make_ ’em act sensible and they will be sensible.” He then watched to see whether I would give him money for no particular reason, and as I made no gestures to that effect I went away, and thus avoided what politicians call “studied insolence.” A Reconstruction of the Past “It has been said with some justice that we know more about the Victorian Period in England than we do of any one of the intervening nine centuries, even of those which lie closest to our own time, and even of such events as have taken place upon our own soil in the Malay Peninsula. I will attempt to put before you very briefly, as a sort of introduction to the series of lectures which I am to deliver, a picture of what one glimpse of life in London towards the end of the Nineteenth Century must have resembled. “It is a sound rule in history to accept none but positive evidence and to depend especially upon the evidence of documents. I will not debate how far tradition should be admitted into the reconstruction of the past. It _may_ contain elements of truth; it _must_ contain elements of falsehood, and on that account I propose neither to deny nor to admit this species of information, but merely to ignore it; and I think the student will see before I have done with my subject that, using only the positive information before us, a picture may be drawn so fully detailed as almost to rival our experience of contemporary events. “We will imagine ourselves,” continued the professor, with baleful smile of playful pedantry, “in Piccadilly, the fashionable promenade of the city, at nine o’clock in the morning, the hour when the greatest energies of this imperial people were apparent in their outdoor life; for, as we know from the famous passage which we owe to the pen of the pseudo-Kingsley, the English people, as befitted their position, were the earliest risers of their time. We will further imagine (to give verisimilitude to the scene) the presence of a north-east wind, in which these hardy Northerners took exceptional delight, and to which the anonymous author above alluded to has preserved a famous hymn.