Labouchere continues in his note-book to describe, with naïve minuteness of detail, his search for wisdom after he left the university. "With great liberality," he wrote, "my father paid my debts, and advised my return home. My family ... was religious, and, finding my father's house dull, I had accustomed myself to live at a tavern in Covent Garden.... After remaining there for two or three weeks, I used to return home, and leave it indefinite from where I had come. Until my leaving College and the payment of my debts by my father, I had kept up an appearance of respectability at home. Now, however, I threw off all restraint, and openly lived at my tavern for about two months, during which I lost several hundred pounds at hells and casinos." The tavern which Labouchere frequented at this period was far from being the haunt of vice which, with the gloomy sternness of moralising youth, he wished to depict it. It was a species of night club, known as Evans', and was the resort of all literary and artistic London. It constantly figures in Thackeray's novels and other books of the period as a place of Bohemian rendezvous and the scene of a good deal of rough-and-tumble jollity. The house, of which it formed the cellar, had once been the home of Sir Kenelm Digby. Above the tavern, or "Cave of Harmony" as Thackeray called it, was the hotel in which Labouchere had his rooms. In later years, that is to say in the later fifties and early sixties, the popularity of this place of conviviality increased so much that it was found necessary to pull down the little room where Labouchere used to listen every night to the singing of more or less rowdy songs, and build on its site a vast concert-room, with an annexe, consisting of a comfortable hall, hung with theatrical portraits, where conversation could be carried on. There was a private {29} supper-room in the grill, and this annexe became a popular resort for men about town. Some of the smartest talk in London was to be heard at Evans', for it numbered among its patrons such wits as Douglas Jerrold, Thackeray, Lionel Lawson, Edmund Yates, Augustus Sala, Serjeant Ballantine, John Leech, Serjeant Murphy--and Henry Labouchere. The presiding spirit of the establishment was a great friend of Labouchere's. He acted as head waiter and was known as Paddy Green. He had commenced his career as a chorus-singer at the Adelphi Theatre, and had won for himself in all classes of society an immense popularity on account of his courtesy and unfailing good-humour. The prosperity of Evans' only waned when the modern music-halls, where women formed the larger part of the audience, became the fashion.[9]