abs over
vast foggy tracts of the town, after much arrangement in advance and
with a renewal of far peregrination, through twisting passages and
catacombs, even after crossing the magic threshold. We sat in strange
places, with still stranger ones behind or beside; we felt walls and
partitions, in our rear, getting so hot that we wondered if the house
was to burst into flame; I recall in especial our being arrayed, to the
number of nine persons, all of our contingent, in a sort of rustic
balcony or verandah which, simulating the outer gallery of a Swiss
cottage framed in creepers, formed a feature of Mr. Albert Smith's
once-famous representation of the Tour of Mont Blanc. Big, bearded,
rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my senses,
though subject to the reflection that his type and presence,
superficially so important, so ample, were somehow at odds with such
ingratiations, with the reckless levity of his performance--a
performance one of the great effects of which was, as I remember it, the
very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernay, with the
ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travellers, the
slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal
champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith's mere
personal resources and graces. But it is the publicity of our situation
as a happy family that I best remember, and how, to our embarrassment,
we seemed put forward in our illustrative chalet as part of the
boisterous show and of what had been paid for by the house. Two other
great evenings stand out for me as not less collectively enjoyed, one of
these at the Princess's, then under the management of Charles Kean, the
unprecedented (as he was held) Shakespearean revivalist, the other at
the Olympic, where Alfred Wigan, the extraordinary and too short-lived
Robson and the shrewd and handsome Mrs. Stirling were the high
attraction. Our enjoyment of Charles Kean's presentation of Henry the
Eighth figures to me as a momentous date in our lives: we did nothing
for weeks afterwards but try to reproduce in water-colours Queen
Katharine's dream-vision of the beckoning, consoling angels, a radiant
group let down from the skies by machinery then thought marvellous--when
indeed we were not parading across our schoolroom stage as the
portentous Cardinal and impressively alternating his last speech to
Cromwell with Buckingham's, that is with Mr. Ryder's, address on t