, its moral atmosphere is
yet charged with a sparkle as of light wine. It is more effervescent
than any continental city. It is the city of cities for learning, art,
wit, and--Carnival. Go where you please at nightfall and Carnival slips
into the blood, lighting even Bond Street--the dreariest street in
town--with a little flame of gaiety. I have assisted at carnivals and
feasts in various foreign parts--carnivals of students and also of the
theatrically desperate apaches in the crawling underworlds. But, oh,
what bilious affairs! You simply flogged yourself into it. You said, as
it were: "I am in Vienna, or Berlin, or Paris, or Brussels, or
Marseilles, or Trieste; therefore, I am gay. Of course I am gay." But
you were not. You were only bored, and the show only became endurable
after you had swallowed various absinthes, vermuths, and other rot-gut.

All the time you were--or I was--aching for Camden Town High Street, and
a good old London music-hall. I cannot understand those folk who sniff
at the English music-hall and belaud the Parisian shows. These latter
are to me the most dismal, lifeless form of entertainment that a public
ever suffered. Give me the Oxford, the Pavilion, or the Alhambra, or
even a suburban Palace of Varieties. Ever since the age of eight the
music-hall has been a kind of background for me. Long before that age I
can remember being rushed through strange streets and tossed,
breathless, into an overheated theatre roaring with colour. The show was
then either the Moore and Burgess Minstrels or the Egyptian Hall,
followed by that chief of all child-life entertainments--tea at a
tea-shop. But at eight I was initiated into the mysteries of the Halls,
for a gracious _chef d'orchestre_ permitted me to sit in the orchestra
of an outlying hall, by the side of a cousin who sawed the double bass.

I have loved the music-hall ever since, and I still worship that _chef
d'orchestre_, and if I met him now I am sure I should bow, though I know
that he was nothing but a pillow stuffed with pose. But in those days,
what a man! Or no--not a man--what a demi-god! You should have seen him
enter the orchestra on the call: "Mr. Francioli, please!" Your ordinary
music-hall conductor ducks from below, slips into his chair, and his tap
has turned on the flow of his twenty instruments before you realize that
he is up. But not so Francioli. For him the old school, the old manners,
laddie. He never came into the orchestra. H