as little inclined as I to furnish a new proof of
the wise old proverb. One day a would-be wit who was regular in his
attendance and his talk, and who should have known better, asked J.,
"Are you still running your Thursday Club?" and so helped to precipitate
the end. We were not running a Club for anybody, and if the fame of our
Thursday night filled our rooms with people who behaved as if we were,
the sooner we got rid of them the better.

Besides, as the weeks and the months and the years went on, many who had
come and talked and fought our Thursday night through ceased to come
altogether. Where I failed in breaking up the groups Time, with its
cruel thoroughness, succeeded and began to scatter them far and wide.
Death stilled voices that had been loudest. The _National Observer_
passed out of Henley's hands and Henley himself into the Valley of the
Shadow. Bob Stevenson said his last good-night to us. Beardsley,
Harland, Arthur Tomson, George Steevens, Phil May, Furse,
Iwan-Mueller--one after another of our old friends, one after another of
those old masters of talk set out on the journey into the Great Silence.
It is hard to believe they have gone. I remember how, when they were
with us and the talk was at its maddest and somebody would suddenly take
breath long enough to look out of our windows, whose curtains were
never drawn upon the one spectacle we could offer--the river with the
boats trailing their lights down its shadowy reaches, and the Embankment
with the lights of the hansoms flying to and fro, and the bridges with
the procession of lights from the omnibuses and cabs and the trails of
burning cloud from the trains--Henley would say, "How it lives, how it
throbs with life out there!" and I would think to myself, "And how it
lives, how it throbs with life in here!"--with a life too intense, it
seemed, ever to wear itself out. And yet now only two or three of the
old friends of the old Thursday nights are left to look down with us
upon the river where it flows below our windows--upon the moving lights
of London's great traffic, upon London's great life and great beauty,
and great movement without end.

It is not only the dead we have lost. Time has made other changes as sad
as any wrought by Death. The young have grown old,--have thrown off
youth's "proud livery" for the sombre garment of age. The years have
turned the rebel of yesterday into the Royal Academician of to-day. The
inspired young prophet who