Of course we all know who she was, the Miss Prior of Shrublands, whom papa and grandmamma called to the unruly children. Years had passed since I had shaken the Beak Street dust off my feet. The brass plate of “Prior” was removed from the once familiar door, and screwed, for what I can tell, on to the late reprobate owner’s coffin. A little eruption of mushroom-formed brass knobs I saw on the door-post when I passed by it last week, and CAFÉ DES AMBASSADEURS was thereon inscribed, with three fly-blown blue teacups, a couple of coffee-pots of the well-known Britannia metal, and two freckled copies of the _Indépendance Belge_ hanging over the window blind. Were those their Excellencies the Ambassadors at the door, smoking cheroots? Pool and Billiards were written on their countenances, their hats, their elbows. They may have been ambassadors down on their luck, as the phrase is. They were in disgrace, no doubt, at the court of her imperial majesty Queen Fortune. Men as shabby have retrieved their disgraces ere now, washed their cloudy faces, strapped their dingy waistcoats with cordons, and stepped into fine carriages from quarters not a whit more reputable than the Café des Ambassadeurs. If I lived in the Leicester Square neighbourhood, and kept a café, I would always treat foreigners with respect. They may be billiard-markers now, or doing a little shady police business; but why should they not afterwards be generals and great officers of state? Suppose that gentleman is at present a barber, with his tongs and stick of fixature for the mustachios, how do you know he has not his epaulettes and his _bâton de maréchal_ in the same pouch? I see engraven on the second-floor bell, on my rooms, “Plugwell.” Who can Plugwell be, whose feet now warm at the fire where I sate many a long evening? And this gentleman with the fur collar, the straggling beard, the frank and engaging leer, the somewhat husky voice, who is calling out on the door-step, “Step in, and ’ave it done. Your correct likeness, only one shilling”--is he an ambassador, too? Ah, no: he is only the _Chargé d’affaires_ of a photographer who lives upstairs: no doubt where the little ones used to be. Law bless me! Photography was an infant, and in the nursery, too, when _we_ lived in Beak Street.