In their later years they lived a good deal in the past. At some dinner-party at our house in London the soup was handed round as mock-turtle, whereas it was real-turtle, and Mary was proud of having made it. She never let the others hear the last of that. There was to be another party there, for which great preparations had been made. But, as Ann told me quite angrily, “on the very morning of the party, King William went and died, and the party had to be put off, and all the things were spoilt.” And she was very cross about it still. There were illuminations for Queen Victoria’s wedding; and the house was decked with night-lights in little globes of coloured glass. Ann put them carefully away, and brought them out in 1887 for the Jubilee. There were illuminations for the wedding of the Prince of Wales; and I had a night out, 10 March 1863. At the top of Trafalgar Square a wheel of our brougham got locked into the wheels of another carriage; and it was impossible to lift them clear, owing to the pressure of the crowd. We stayed there for hours. The illuminations in 1863 were things that people would not look at now. There were gas-pipes twisted into stars and monograms and crowns, with little holes punctured for the gas: there were some transparencies, mostly with oil lamps behind; and there were a few devices in cut glass. The crowd was feebler also. People say we are degenerate now, but I think it is the other way: some of the worst types seem to be extinct. We moved into a new house in London on 23 June 1864, and I meant to celebrate the jubilee by moving out on 23 June 1914, but was not ready then, and did not finish my move till 23 November. Being newly built, the house had a hot-water cistern in the bath-room, fed automatically by the kitchen boiler more than forty feet below. That was a novelty in 1864; and, when people came to call, they went upstairs to look at it, and could not make it out. A gifted Fellow of King’s was quite disturbed about it till he thought of Heracleitos and the maxim _Panta Rhei_, and that enabled him to place our cistern in its true position in the Universe. Of course, these people knew that hot water was lighter than cold, and would go up while cold went down, yet were unable to follow the theory into practice. I have noticed the same thing several times, when going to Gibraltar by the P. & O. People on board have said the clock was being altered because we were going south. They knew theoretically what the reason was, but could not apply their knowledge.