Talleyrand was an _habitué_ of the Travellers’, and it was here that he made his well-known reply to someone who wondered how a certain great lady could, at her age, have married, as she had done, a _valet de chambre_: “It was late in the game” replied Talleyrand, who was playing whist at the time. “At nine we don’t reckon honours.” The Athenæum, at the corner of Waterloo Place, built in 1829, is a very learned club, and appropriately has the finest club library in London. Its premises, which are thoroughly classic, were designed by Decimus Burton. It had been instituted five years previously by, among others, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Wilson Croker, Sir Humphrey Davy, and that Jekyll, whom George IV., when Prince of Wales, insisted on Eldon’s making a Master in Chancery. I will not again inflict the well-known anecdote on long-suffering readers; but I may remind them that on one occasion the hospitality of the Junior Army and Navy, on the other side of Waterloo Place, was, during some cleaning process, extended to the members of the Athenæum, many of whom graced the church, and that soon after, the umbrella of one of the service members mysteriously disappeared; whereupon the irate soldier exclaimed, “Exactly, I knew what it would be when we agreed to allow those d----d bishops to come to our shop!” Talking of shops reminds me that Hoby’s, the celebrated bootmaker’s, was, till quite recently, opposite, at the corner of John Street--the shortest thoroughfare, by the bye, in London. The original Hoby was a great character, and said what he liked to his customers, who were legion, and frequently illustrious. He made the Duke of Wellington’s boots, and always attributed the successes of that great leader to this fact, and also, parenthetically, to the prayers which he used to offer up on his behalf! Two examples of Hoby’s way of talking to his _clientèle_ are extant; one, when Ensign Churchill complained of some boots made to his order, and Hoby, putting on a mock serious face, turned to an assistant and told him to put up the shutters, as if the Ensign’s custom was withdrawn, there was an end of the business; the other, when a nobleman complained of his riding boots being uncomfortable when he walked, whereupon Hoby told him that he had made the boots for riding not for walking.