ld the Great. Inevitably I sought their haunts--and they
were not all gone in those days; the Bull-and-Gate in Holborn, whither
Mr. Tom Jones repaired on his arrival in town, and the White Hart
Tavern, where Mr. Pickwick fell in with Mr. Sam Weller; the regions
about Leicester Fields and Russell Square sacred to the memory of
Captain Booth and the lovely Amelia and Becky Sharp; where Garrick drank
tea with Dr. Johnson and Henry Esmond tippled with Sir Richard Steele.
There was yet a Pump Court, and many places along Oxford Street where
Mantalini and De Quincy loitered: and Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
Evans' Coffee House, or shall I say the Cave of Harmony, and The
Cock and the Cheshire Cheese were near at hand for refreshment in
the agreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver
Goldsmith and Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly
glasses amid the punch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew
London when it was still Old London--the knowledge of Temple Bar and
Cheapside--before the vandal horde of progress and the pickaxe of the
builder had got in their nefarious work.

III

Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred--by chance,
I am ashamed to say--to Mrs. Scott's letter of introduction to her
brother. The address read "Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines, Jermyn
Street." Why, it was but two or three blocks away, and being so near I
called, not knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be.

I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me
was exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially and
we had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife and
I were invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no
one to tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be connected with
the School of Mines.

It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name
of Tyndall and another by the name of Mill--of neither I had ever
heard--but there was still another of the name of Spencer, whom I
fancied must be a literary man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever
book on Education some four years agone by a writer of that name; a
certain Herbert Spencer, whom I rightly judged might he be.

The dinner, I repeat, was a very good dinner indeed--the Huxleys, I took
it, must be well to do--the company agreeable; a bit pragmatic, however,
I thought. The gentleman by the name of Spencer said he l