doubt of your
talent,' writes my mother. 'Enfin c'est prouve que je suis au
moins bon a quelque chose.' Do you go much into the world?
I go knocking about as happily as possible, singing and
smoking cigars everywhere. Jimmy Whistler and I go 'tumbling'
together, as Thackeray says. Would you were here to tumble
with us! Enfin, mon bon, ecris moi vite."

When at last I too returned to London I was privileged to take my
humble share in the "tumbling," as also in the steady process that was
gradually to wean us from Bohemia. We tumbled pretty regularly into
the Pamphilon, a restaurant within a stone's throw of Oxford Circus,
of the familiar type that exhibits outside its door a bill of fare
with prices appended, to be studied by those who count their shillings
and pence as we did. We had got beyond the days when no wines are sour
and when tough meat passes muster, if there is only plenty of it; we
wanted a sound dinner, and we got it at the Pamphilon; to wind up we
adjourned to the coffee-room and talked and read and smoked.

Stacey Marks, Poynter, Jimmy Whistler, and Charles Keene were among
the crew, and others not so well known to fame. Pleasant hours those
and gemuethliche, as the Germans say; how different the after-dinner
clay pipe or cheap weed of those times to the post-prandial havannah
we now complacently whiff at our friend's Maecenas' hospitable table!
Yes, things have changed, my dear Rag, since the day we were paying
our bill, and you addressed the waiter with superb affability: "Here,
Charles, is a penny for you. I know it isn't much, but I can't afford
more."

It is hard to fancy anything less like Bohemia than Regent Street,
but a little incident that occurred as I walked down that busy
thoroughfare one afternoon recalls the best traditions of the land in
which practical jokes abound. I was going along without any definite
aim, killing time and gathering wool, flaneing, in fact; perhaps there
was a touch of the foreigner about me, for I had only lately returned
from abroad; anyway I suddenly found myself singled out as a fit
subject to be victimised. I felt a hand stealthily sliding into my
pocket; on the spur of the moment I grasped that hand in as much of an
iron grip as I could muster. Then--I hardly know why--I waited quite
a number of seconds before I turned round. When I did, it was du
Maurier's face that I beheld, blanched with terror. Those seconds
had been ages to him.