Among the advantages upon which I have not sufficiently dilated, the Maecenas Club had a smoking-room, of which the members were justly proud. Great improvements have been lately made; but in those days the smoking-room was a novel ingredient in club-comfort, and its necessity was not sufficiently recognized. Old gentlemen, generally predominant in clubs, were violently opposed to tobacco, save in the shape of the club snuff; regarded smoking as a sure sign of dissipation, if not of entirely perverted morality, and combined together in committee and out of committee to worry, harass, and annoy the devotees of the cigar. Consequently these last were in most clubs relegated to a big gaunt room at the top of the house, which had palpably been formed by the removal of the partition between two servants' attics, a room with bare walls, an oil-cloth-covered floor, like a hair-dresser's cutting-room, a few imitation-marble-topped tables, some windsor chairs, and a slippery black-leather ottoman stuck against the wall. Thither, to that tremendous height, the waiter, humorously supposed to be devoted to the room, seldom penetrated; and you sat and smoked your cigar, and sipped your gin-and-seltzer when you were lucky enough to get it, and watched your neighbour looming through a fog of his own manufacture in solemn silence. It required a bold man to penetrate to such howling wildernesses as the smoking-rooms of the Retrenchment, the True Blue, and the No Surrender in those days; nor were they much better off at the Rag, save in summer, when they rigged up a tent in the back-yard, and held their _tabagie_ under canvas. At the Minerva they had no smoking-room; the bishops, and other old women in power there, distinctly refusing to sanction a place for any such orgies. But at the Maecenas the smoking-room was _the_ room in the house. None of your attics or cock-lofts, none of your stair-climbing, to get into a bare garret at the end of your toil. At the Maecenas you went straight through the hall, past all the busts of the eminent gentlemen, through a well-lit stone passage, where, if you were lucky, you might see, in a little room on the right, honest Mr. Turquand the steward brewing a jorum of that gin-punch for which the Club was so renowned; past the housekeeper's room, where Mrs. Norris sat breast-high in clean table-linen, and surrounded by garlands of lemons and groves of spices; past the big refrigerator, into which Tom Custance threatened to dip little Captain Rodney one night, when that peppery light-weight had had too much of the Club claret; and then, built over what should have been the garden, you found the pride of the little M. A big square room, lit by a skylight in summer, or sun-burner in winter, with so much wall paper as could be seen of a light-green colour, but with the walls nearly covered with sketches in oil, crayon, and water-colour, contributed by members of the Club.