l when the day
of action had arrived respecting the share company--a lord in the City
having as palpable a value as the most favorable news that ever sent up
the Funds.

When they reached London they separated, Bramleigh taking up his
quarters in the Burlington, while Lord Culduff--on pretence of running
down to some noble duke's villa near Richmond--snugly installed himself
in a very modest lodging off St. James's Street, where a former valet
acted as his cook and landlord, and on days of dining out assisted at
the wonderful toilet, whose success was alike the marvel and the envy of
Culduff s contemporaries.

Though a man of several clubs, his Lordship's favorite haunt was a
small unimposing-looking house close to St. James's Square, called the
"Plenipo." Its members were all diplomatists, nothing below the head of
a mission being eligible for ballot. A Masonic mystery pervaded all
the doings of that austere temple, whose dinners were reported to be
exquisite, and whose cellar had such a fame that "Plenipo Lafitte" had a
European reputation.

Now, veteran asylums have many things recommendatory about them, but
from Greenwich and the Invalides downwards there is one especial vice
that clings to them--they are haunts of everlasting complaint. The
men who frequent them all belong to the past, their sympathies, their
associations, their triumphs and successes, all pertain to the bygone.
Harping eternally over the frivolity, the emptiness, and sometimes the
vulgarity of the present, they urge each other on to most exaggerated
notions of the time when they were young, and a deprecatory estimate of
the world then around them.

It is not alone that the days of good dinners and good conversation have
passed away, but even good manners have gone, and more strangely too,
good looks. "I protest you don't see such women now"--one of these
bewigged and rouged old debauchees would say, as he gazed at the slow
procession moving on to a drawing-room, and his compeers would concur
with him, and wonderingly declare that the thing was inexplicable.

In the sombre-looking breakfast-room of this austere temple, Lord
Culduff sat reading the "Times." A mild, soft rain was falling without;
the water dripping tepid and dirty through the heavy canopy of a London
fog; and a large coal fire blazed within--that fierce furnace which
seems so congenial to English taste; not impossibly because it recalls
the factory and the smelting-house--the "