My personal acquaintance with Regent Street dates from the year ’thirty-two, when I remember a great scrambling procession of operatives, with parti-coloured flags, emblazoned with devices I could not read, passing down it. Mrs. Esner, who was then attached to my person in a domestic capacity (she often calls upon me now, and, saying that she “nussed” me, expatiates on the benefits of a pound of green tea), told me that these operatives belonged to the “Trades Union.” She said—though the good woman must have exaggerated—that they were half a million in number, and I recollect her portending, in a grave low voice, that there would be riots that night. I don’t think that any occurred; but long after, whenever I saw a crowd I used to ask whether “there would be any riots” that night, just as I might have inquired whether there would be any bread-and-butter for tea. This was about the time that they used to call the great Duke of Wellington “Nosey,” and “Sawbones,” and to break his windows. I was too young to know then, that the Athenians grew tired of hearing Aristides called “The Just;” and that a nation once grumbled at having to pay for the palace it had bestowed upon that John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, who won the battle of Blenheim. I think, too, there must have been something about the Cholera in my earliest recollections of Regent Street; yet, no: I lived in North Audley Street at that time, and opposite the mansion of the great Earl of Clarendon; for, as clearly as though it were yesterday, I see now in the eye to which the attention of Horatio, friend of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, was directed—a hot autumn afternoon. I am at the nursery-window in sad disgrace, and pouting because I have wrenched the sprightly wooden hussar from the horse which had the semi-circle of wire with the bullet at the end fixed in his stomach, and who used, with that impetus, to swing so deftly. There is much commotion in the great earl’s mansion; for one of the servants partook too plentifully last night of gooseberry-fool after a rout his lordship gave—where are the “routs” and the “gooseberry-fools” now?—and she is dead this morning of cholera morbus. My female _entourage_ are unanimously exacting in calling it cholera “morbus.” The undertaker’s men bring the body out; the shell gleams white in the afternoon’s sunshine, and it is begirt with cords; “for,” says the domestic oracles behind me, “it was so mortal swole that it would ’ave bust else.” A horrible rumour runs about, that the coffin has been “pitched and sealed.” What can “pitching and sealing” mean? There is a great crowd before the earl’s door, who are violent and clamorous, because rumour—a servant’s hall, an area gate, a coachman from-the-house-to-his-wife-in-the-mews rumour—bruits it about that the body has not been washed. My nurse says that they will have to send for the “padroll” with “cut-lashes.” All these things sink into my little mind; and then the whole sequel, with