ings to the drama of the sixties, and he still
addresses every one as Laddie or My Dear.

He hailed me in Oxford Street, and cried: "Where now, laddie, where
now?"

"I don't know," I said. "Anywhere."

"Then I'll come with you."

So we wandered. It was half-past seven. The night was purple, and
through a gracious mist the lights glittered with subdued brilliance.
London was in song. Cabs and 'buses and the evening crowd made its
music. I heard it calling me. So did Georgie. With tacit sympathy we
linked arms and strolled westwards, and dropped in at one of the big
bars, and talked.

We talked of the old days--before I was born. Georgie told me of the
crowd that decorated the place in the nineties: that company of
feverish, foolish verbal confectioners who set themselves Byronically to
ruin their healths and to write self-pitiful songs about the ruins. Half
a dozen elegant Sadies and Mamies were at the American end of the bar,
with their escorts, drinking Horse's Necks, Maiden's Prayers, Mother's
Milks, Manhattans, and Scotch Highballs. Elsewhere the Cockney revellers
were drinking their eternal whisky-and-sodas or beers, and their
salutations led Georgie to a disquisition on the changing toasts of the
last twenty years. To-day it is something short and sharp: either
"Hooray!" or "Here's fun!" or "Cheero!" or a non-committal "Wow-wow!"
Ten years back it was: "Well, Laddie, here's doing it again!" or "Good
health, old boy, and may we get all we ask for!" And ten years before
that it was something even more grandiloquent.

From drink we drifted to talking about food; and I have already told you
how wide is Georgie's knowledge of the business of feeding in London. We
both hate the dreary, many-dished dinners of the hotels, and we both
love the cosy little chop-houses, of which a few only now remain: one or
two in Fleet Street, and perhaps half a dozen in the little alleys off
Cornhill and Lombard Street. I agree, too, with Georgie in deploring the
passing of the public-house mid-day ordinary. From his recollections, I
learn that the sixties and seventies were the halcyon days for
feeding--indeed, the only time when Londoners really lived; and an
elderly uncle of mine, who, at that time, went everywhere and knew
everybody in the true hard-up Bohemia, tells me that there were then
twenty or thirty taverns within fifty yards of Ludgate Circus, where the
shilling ordinary was a feast for an Emperor, and whose interiors