For my own part, as there was nothing to do before eleven, I amused myself by going round and seeing the rooms all lit up with candles in sconces or by candelabra and painted with flowers and fruit and Cupids even to the ceiling, and hung with costly curtains. It is a large and spacious house, of commanding appearance, built by an Earl of Carlisle. There is a grand staircase, broad and stately: when a well-dressed Company are going up and down it looks like the staircase of a Palace: on the landing I found flowers in pots and bushes in tubs which gave the place a rural appearance and so might lead the thoughts of the visitor insensibly into the country. There are a great many rooms in the original House which has been very handsomely increased by the addition of two large chambers, one above the other, built out at the back, over part of the garden. One of these new rooms was the Ball Room which I have already mentioned. The other room below it, equally large but not so high, was used as the supper-room. It had its walls painted with dancing Satyrs and Fauns: gilded pilasters, raised an inch or so, relieved the flatness of the wall. This was the supper-room: for the moment it had nothing in it but long narrow tables arranged down the room in rows: the servants were already beginning to spread upon them the napery and lay the knives and forks for supper. On the ground-floor on the right hand of the entrance hall was a large room used as a card room. Here stood a long table covered with a green cloth for the players of those games which require a Bank or a large company. They are Hazard, Lansquenet, Loo, Faro, and I know not how many more. But, whatever their names, they all mean the same thing and only one thing, viz., gambling. Along the wall on either side were small tables for parties of two or four, who came to play Quadrille, Whist, Piquet, Ecarté, and the like--games more dangerous to the young and the beginner than the more noisy gambling of the crowd. Candles stood on all the small tables and down the middle of the great table: there were also candles in sconces on the wall. As yet none of them were lit. While I was looking round the empty room, Madame herself came in dressed in white satin, and carrying her domino in her hand. 'I look into every room,' she said, 'before the doors are open: but into this room I look two or three times every evening.' 'You come to look at the players?'