It is said that a certain place not mentionable to "ears polite" is paved with "good intentions." Whether it will ever be macadamized (for that, I believe, is the term for "unstoning," now fast gaining ground, as I am looking over my paper, which, in all probability, everybody else will overlook) I cannot pretend to say; but certain it is, that although I was beyond measure mortified by the results of the Twickenham prank, my exclusion from the society of the Miss Dods, and my absolutely necessary escape from an association with them, I was very soon reconciled to my fate after the arrival of Devil Daly (as I used subsequently to call him) at my lodgings in Suffolk Street. The instant he had been dislodged from the cottage by the appearance of the young ladies whose family he had so seriously outraged on the previous evening, instead of walking his horse back to Smart's, at the Toy, at Hampton Court, he cantered up to visit me in London; not so much from any particular affection for me, but because, although himself the victim, there was something so exciting and delightful to him in a joke, that he could not deny himself the pleasure of narrating to me the history of the arrival of the sylphs, and his extraordinary ruse of the bleeding nose. I never saw him in higher spirits, and, _quoad_ my resolutions, I could not, for the life of me, refuse to join him in a stroll about town, which, although the season was somewhat advanced, was yet agreeably full, with a pledge to dine with him somewhere afterwards. In those days clubs were scarce, although _then_ hearts were plenty; there were no clubs of note at that period but White's, Brookes's, and Boodle's. To be sure, there was the Cocoa Tree, and there was Graham's, but the number of members was small, the system confined, and therefore, although Daly and I were as proud as Lucifer, and as "fine as fine could be," men had no resource when they wished to enjoy the "feast of reason and the flow of soul"--the one in the shape of a cutlet, and the other in the tapering form of a bottle of claret--but to repair to a coffee-house, a place which, I find, is now (I speak while I am arranging my papers) obsolete--a dear, nice, uncomfortable room, with a bar opening into it, a sanded floor, an argand lamp smoking a tin tray in the middle of its ceiling, boxes along its sides, with hard carpet-covered benches, schoolboy tables, and partitions, with rods, and rings, and curtains, like those of a churchwarden's pew in a country church.