Shepherd Market is almost deserted at this hour in the late afternoon. The old coaching yard is full of black shadows, and there are no customers in the shops. Lights are dim, and the echoes of footsteps in neighbouring courts and passages can be heard a long way off. In Carrington Mews some warmth of the fading sunset still lingered, and I left it with reluctance to mount the dark staircase to my room. There are days when one feels all is well--not only with _this_ world, but with the next, which is presumably more important. Youth, on such days, returns to whisper flatteries in the ears of Old Age. Is it wisdom or foolishness on the part of Old Age to listen? I leave you with that question on the thirty-fifth anniversary of our friendship. Do you remember? GEORGE. CHAPTER XI CARRINGTON MEWS, SHEPHERD MARKET, _17th February._ My Dear Agatha,--So you, too, remembered! Strange, after our having overlooked the anniversary for so long! The violets you picked for me in your garden _that_ afternoon scented my room for days. Thank you. Acting on your advice, I took Mrs. D. to the London Museum yesterday. You are quite right, the place was made for children, and the old lady thoroughly enjoyed herself. The basement, with its long stone-paved corridors, its gloom (dispelled, I am forced to admit, by electric light), is the right place for the models of ancient London, old doorways, knockers, horn lanthorns, oak panelling, relics of Newgate, prison cells, and yellowed news sheets containing the accounts of the execution of celebrated criminals. One catches the mood of the place when one gets to the bottom of the stairs and sees the row of wooden figures each of which has weathered many a storm from its post outside some shop in the London streets of a hundred and fifty years or more ago. The grocers' Chinaman, the tobacconists' Highlander, and the scale-makers' figure of Justice. Now and again, at rare intervals, we may meet the Highlander outside a tobacconist's, or the figure of Justice over the scale-maker's window, but the Chinaman seems to have completely disappeared. To go into the basement of the London Museum is like opening the door of some dim, dusty lumber-room and unearthing the forgotten toys of our childhood. Things which we greet with an indulgent smile, and now and again a sigh. The basement is a place to visit on that sort of idle afternoon in early Spring when one is moved to turn out old letters, to bring to mind the playmates of one's youth, and muse, while the light wanes, on the changes the years have brought. Here is a shop-front of George III's time, and behind the small-paned window a grotesque collection of ragged puppets, the property of some long-defunct proprietor of a Punch and Judy show. Many a time must those grimacing dolls have played in the immortal drama to an audience of our great-great-great-grandfathers.