Perhaps it may be worth noting here as an incident illustrating change of manners that I vividly remember my mother often singing to us children in Keppel Street an old song about an “unfortunate Miss Bayly,” who had been seduced by a “Captain bold of Halifax, who dwelt in country quarters.” Now a purer or more innocent-minded woman than my mother did not live, nor one less likely to have suffered aught that she imagined to be unfitted _virginibus puerisque_ to reach the ears of her children. Nor do I suppose that we had the faintest notion of the nature of the evil inflicted on the unfortunate Miss Bayly by the Captain bold, nor that we were in any degree scandalised by the subsequent incident of the parish priest being bribed by “a one pound note” to accord Christian burial to the corpse of a suicide, which he had previously refused to bury. It may be feared that quite as many “unfortunates” share the fate of Miss Bayly either in town or country quarters at the present day as in the early days of the century. But I take it that the old world ditty in question would not be selected for nursery use at the present day. I could chatter on about those childish days in Keppel Street, and have been, I am afraid, too garrulous already. What I have said, however, is all illustrative of the social changes seventy years have wrought, and may at the same time serve to show that I started on my octogenarian career a sturdy, hardy little mortal, _non sine Dîs animosus infans_. CHAPTER II. These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the present day almost--perhaps quite--as different from the London of the second decade of this century as the latter was from “the town” in the days of George the First. But it is difficult for middle-aged people of the present day to form any vivid and sufficient conception of the greatness of them. Of course the mere material ameliorations and extensions have so metamorphosed the localities that I, on returning after long years to the London I once knew, topographically at least, so well, find myself in a new town of which the geography is in some parts strange to me, with just so much of the old landmarks remaining as serves to suggest false clues to the labyrinth and render the matter more puzzling. But the changes in ways and habits and modes of living and feeling and thinking are still greater and of much more profound significance.