At Eleven o’Clock in the evening, the social institutions known as Evening Parties assume their gayest and most radiant aspect. I think that I have already hinted in these pages that I am not a very frequent visitor at these entertainments. The truth must out: the people don’t like me. At the last _soirée_ I attended, a fashionable physician, coming in very late, and throwing out for general hearing the fact that he had been dining with an earl, I meekly suggested that he should allow me to rub myself up against him, in order to catch some of his aristocracy. All the women laughed, but the men looked as though they would have very much liked to throw me out of the window. There was one exception—a gentleman with one eye, and a face like a glass case full of curiosities, so many different phases of expression were there in it, who came across to me and made friends at once. But I shall never be asked to that house again; and if I am ill, I won’t send for the fashionable physician. _Timeo Danäos_, and the pills they give you. Thus circumstanced, I feel it becoming my degree to stay on the outside of great houses, and, herding among the crowd and the link-men, to witness the setting down and the taking up of the carriages coming to or going from evening parties. It has always been my lot so to stand on the kerb, to be a continual dweller on the threshold. I have stood there to see people married, to see people buried, and have murmured: “My turn must come next, surely;” but my time has not come yet. A king has patted me on the head, and I have sate, as a child, on the knee of the handsomest woman in Europe. I have been on the brink of many a precipice; I have attained the edge of many a cloud. But I have stopped there. I have always been like the recalcitrant costermonger’s donkey, “going for to go,” but never accomplishing the journey in its entirety.