r of Great Queen-street, and
persists in carrying you to the very door of the Freemasons', round which
a crowd of people are assembled to witness the entrance of the indigent
orphans' friends. You hear great speculations as you pay the fare, on
the possibility of your being the noble Lord who is announced to fill the
chair on the occasion, and are highly gratified to hear it eventually
decided that you are only a 'wocalist.'

The first thing that strikes you, on your entrance, is the astonishing
importance of the committee. You observe a door on the first landing,
carefully guarded by two waiters, in and out of which stout gentlemen
with very red faces keep running, with a degree of speed highly
unbecoming the gravity of persons of their years and corpulency. You
pause, quite alarmed at the bustle, and thinking, in your innocence, that
two or three people must have been carried out of the dining-room in
fits, at least. You are immediately undeceived by the
waiter--'Up-stairs, if you please, sir; this is the committee-room.'
Up-stairs you go, accordingly; wondering, as you mount, what the duties
of the committee can be, and whether they ever do anything beyond
confusing each other, and running over the waiters.

Having deposited your hat and cloak, and received a remarkably small
scrap of pasteboard in exchange (which, as a matter of course, you lose,
before you require it again), you enter the hall, down which there are
three long tables for the less distinguished guests, with a cross table
on a raised platform at the upper end for the reception of the very
particular friends of the indigent orphans. Being fortunate enough to
find a plate without anybody's card in it, you wisely seat yourself at
once, and have a little leisure to look about you. Waiters, with
wine-baskets in their hands, are placing decanters of sherry down the
tables, at very respectable distances; melancholy-looking salt-cellars,
and decayed vinegar-cruets, which might have belonged to the parents of
the indigent orphans in their time, are scattered at distant intervals on
the cloth; and the knives and forks look as if they had done duty at
every public dinner in London since the accession of George the First.
The musicians are scraping and grating and screwing tremendously--playing
no notes but notes of preparation; and several gentlemen are gliding
along the sides of the tables, looking into plate after plate with
frantic eagerness, the expre