There were many foreigners present that night: slim, olive-skinned, black-muzzled Spaniards, with close blue-black hair growing low down on their foreheads, and with their forefingers stained by constant contact with the cigarette; plethoric pudgy Germans, long-bearded and bald-headed, beating time with dumpy hands, ring-bedecked, and not too clean; lively volatile Italians, musical fanatics, who winced at a false note, and shrieked out 'Sh--sh!' in shrillest anger when any of their neighbours attempted conversation. Other foreigners in the boxes--ambassadors these. The Turk, with his crimson fez, in such contrast with his dead-white face; the Russian, who sits with sated eyes and palled ears, looking at indeed, but not regarding, what is going on before him, and thinking of the days when Taglioni danced and Malibran sang; the Frenchman, smiling and chattering with the full knowledge that his own recall is imminent, and that the members of the government which he served might be at any moment displaced, and would be only too thankful if they escaped massacre. A subscription night this, with Patti in the _Barbiere_, with royal highnesses and a serene transparency on a visit for a few weeks, in the royal box; with Philippa Marchioness of Mont-Serrat, with her luxuriant ringlets, looking like a vignette from the Book of Beauty of the year '42, on the grand tier; and with Tom Lydyeard in the fifth row of the stalls, yawning as though his head were coming off. This is Tom Lydyeard, the tall well-bred-looking man with the red beard turning silver at the roots, and the fair hair in which the parting is rather broader than it used to be. Not so young or so active as on that cheerless April morning when he marched across Waterloo-bridge with his regiment on their way to join the troops in the Crimea; but a handsome fellow yet, with a well-preserved figure and a keen eye. Tom has preserved his figure better than his temper, which, on occasions, is apt to be remarkably short; 'Hansom and Growler' is the nickname which this combination of good looks and bad temper has obtained for poor Tom from some of the junior members of the Rag, where he grumbles about the wine and the cooking, snaps at the waiters, and requires all the cajolery of St. Kevin, pleasantest of Irish army-doctors, to keep him within bounds. Tom is evidently not best pleased at the present moment. The man in the stall next to his is a very stout Italian, with lustreless black gloves on his hands and a square diamond brooch in the middle of his plaited shirt-front, who is mopping himself with a purple-silk handkerchief, and with whom Tom Lydyeard is horribly disgusted.