in this hotel, then at Leleux's.
People used to stop here. Good fellows used to ask for poor George
Brummell; Hertford did, so did the Duchess of Devonshire. Not know
Calais indeed! That is a good joke. Had many a good dinner here: sorry I
ever left it."

"My Lord King Edward," chirped the queer old gentleman in the shirt,
"colonized the place with his English, after we had yielded it up to
him. I have heard tell they kept it for nigh three hundred years, till
my Lord de Guise took it from a fair Queen, Mary of blessed memory, a
holy woman. Eh, but Sire Gautier of Mauny was a good knight, a valiant
captain, gentle and courteous withal! Do you remember his ransoming the
----?"

"What is the old fellow twaddlin' about?" cries Brummell. "He is talking
about some knight?--I never spoke to a knight, and very seldom to a
baronet. Firkins, my butterman, was a knight--a knight and alderman.
Wales knighted him once on going into the City."

"I am not surprised that the gentleman should not understand Messire
Eustace of St. Peter's," said the ghostly individual addressed as Mr.
Sterne. "Your reading doubtless has not been very extensive?"

"Dammy, sir, speak for yourself!" cries Mr. Brummell, testily. "I never
professed to be a reading man, but I was as good as my neighbors. Wales
wasn't a reading man; York wasn't a reading man; Clarence wasn't a
reading man; Sussex was, but he wasn't a man in society. I remember
reading your 'Sentimental Journey,' old boy: read it to the Duchess
at Beauvoir, I recollect, and she cried over it. Doosid clever amusing
book, and does you great credit. Birron wrote doosid clever books,
too; so did Monk Lewis. George Spencer was an elegant poet, and my dear
Duchess of Devonshire, if she had not been a grande dame, would have
beat 'em all, by George. Wales couldn't write: he could sing, but he
couldn't spell."

"Ah, you know the great world? so did I in my time, Mr. Brummell. I have
had the visiting tickets of half the nobility at my lodgings in Bond
Street. But they left me there no more cared for than last year's
calendar," sighed Mr. Sterne. "I wonder who is the mode in London now?
One of our late arrivals, my Lord Macaulay, has prodigious merit and
learning, and, faith, his histories are more amusing than any novels, my
own included."

"Don't know, I'm sure not in my line. Pick this bone of chicken," says
Mr. Brummell, trifling with a skeleton bird before him.

"I remember in this city of