I feel no confidence that years have rendered me safe from the first fault which my excellent master thus warned me against; but I am sure they have cured me of the second. I remember too, in connection with those Keppel Street days, to have heard my mother speak of an incident which somewhat curiously illustrates the ways and habits of a time already so far left behind us by a whole world of social changes. It was nothing more than a simple visit to the theatre to hear Mrs. Siddons in Lady Macbeth. But this exploit involved circumstances that rendered it memorable for other reasons besides the intense gratification derived from the performance. In the first place “the pit” was the destination to which my father and mother were bound; not altogether, I take it, so much for the sake of the lower price of admission (though my father was a sufficiently poor and a sufficiently careful man to render this a consideration), as from the idea that the pit offered the best vantage ground for a thoroughly appreciative and critical judgment of the performance. For when we children were taken to see a pantomime we went, as I remember, to the boxes. But this visit to the pit involved the necessity of being at the theatre at two in the afternoon, and then _standing_ in the crowd till, if I rightly remember, six in the evening! Of course food had to be carried. And each man there did his best to support and assist the lady under his charge. But the ordeal must have been something tremendous, and the amount of enthusiasm needed to induce a lady to face it something scarcely to be understood at the present day. My mother used to relate that sundry women were carried out from the crowd at the theatre door fainting. Before closing this Keppel Street chapter of my existence I may mention one or two circumstances of the family life there which illustrate the social habits of those days. The family dinner-hour was five. There were no dinner napkins to be seen; they were perhaps less needed by clean-shaven chins and lips. Two tallow candles, requiring to be snuffed by snuffers lying in a little plated tray _ad hoc_ every now and then, partially illumined the table, but scarcely at all the more distant corners of the room. Nor were any more or better lights used during the evening in the drawing-room. The only alternative would have been wax lights at half-a-crown a pound--an extravagance not to be thought of. Port and sherry were always placed on the shining mahogany table when the cloth was withdrawn, and no other wine. Only on the occasion of having friends to dinner, the port became a “magnum” of a vintage for which my father’s cellar was famous, and possibly Madeira might be added.