custom, pull a wad of crumpled sheets from his coat-tail pocket just as he had done that day at Evans's, when he exclaimed to Mr. Lowell, "I have killed the Colonel! the tears which had been swelling his lids for some time trickling down his face, the last word almost an inarticulate sob." My sketch finished, Henry broiled me a chop and brought me a mug, and I squeezed into Mr. Thackeray's seat and opened my napkin, just as he had done scores of times. The chop was excellent, and so were the contents of the mug; so were the encomiums passed upon my sketch by the proprietor, Henry, and the flat-nosed boy - the latter suggesting that it was "drawed to de loife.” N. B. -Future historians, in writing of this important event, will please not get the dates mixed or twisted, as so often happens. It was at Mr. Thackeray's table in the new Cock, remember, that all this happened, and not with Mr. Thackeray in the old. CHAPTER XIII THE CHESHIRE CHEESE F COURSE he came here, tucked his knees under Ο the sharp edges of the heavy oak tables, and ordered the dishes and brew he especially liked. This, and other like resorts, was his Bohemia, and Bohemia he loved. "A pleasant land," he says in "Philip" -"not fenced with drab stucco like Tyburnia or Belgravia; not guarded by a huge standing army of footmen; not echoing with noble chariots; not replete with polite chintz drawing-rooms and neat tea-tables; a land over which hangs an endless fog, occasioned by much tobacco; a land of chambers, billiardrooms, supper-rooms, oysters; a land of song; a land where soda-water flows freely in the morning; a land of tin dishcovers from taverns, and frothing porter; a land of lotuseating (with lots of cayenne pepper), of pulls on the river, of delicious reading of novels, magazines, and saunterings in many studios; a land where men call each other by their Christian names; where most are old, where almost all are young, and where, if a few oldsters enter, it is because they have preserved more tenderly and carefully than others their youthful spirits, and the delightful capacity to be idle." |