Later, I used to see him pretty frequently in London at the St. James' Club, of which we were both members. He was already beginning to be a recognised wit, and a central figure among talkers in the smoking-room. But I remember old Paddy Green of Evans' still maintaining that he was for all that a simple-minded fellow, made to be the prey of rogues. It was as such that he had known him some years before when Labouchere first appeared in London life and took up his quarters at Evans' Hotel in Covent Garden. The good Irishman had dolorous stories of the way in which his protégé had then been fleeced. "Poor Labouchere, poor Labouchere," he used to say, in his paternally emotional voice; "a good young man, but always his own worst enemy." His own worst enemy he certainly often was. I remember his coming into the Club one evening, it must have been in 1865, when he had just been elected M.P. for Windsor, and boasting to all of us who would listen to him, with every detail, how he had bribed the free and intelligent electors of the Royal Borough, an imprudence which caused him the misfortune of his being unseated immediately afterwards on petition. Of the years that followed, when he was making his name as a journalist, and his fortune on the Stock Exchange, I have nothing particular to record. I came once more into close connection with him in 1882, at the time of the trial of Arabi at Cairo after Tel-el-Kebir. Labouchere, during the early months of the year, had been among those Radicals who in the House of Commons had followed Chamberlain and Dilke in pressing intervention in Egypt on the Foreign Office, and he made no {71} secret of the reason--he was a holder of Egyptian Bonds. The bombardment of Alexandria and the massacre of Tel-el-Kebir, with the revelations which followed of the intrigues which had caused the war, proved, however, too much for his political conscience, which was really sound, and having unloaded his Egyptian stock, which had gone up to higher prices (for he was not a man to neglect a Stock Exchange opportunity), he frankly repented of his sin, and from that time onwards did his best to repair the wrong to Egypt he had joined in doing. He subscribed handsomely to the "Arabi Defence Fund," was always ready to ask questions in the House, and did not scruple to reproach the Grand Old Man with his lapses at Cairo and in the Soudan from his Midlothian principles. In this connection I saw much of him from 1883 to 1885, years during which Egypt occupied so large a share of public attention, and always found him interested in the Egyptian cause and helpful.