constables to every dozen square yards. When two other policemen,
who have had their eye on you for the past ten minutes, are watching
the proceedings from just round the next corner, you have little or
no leisure for due enjoyment of the situation. By the time you have
run the whole length of Great Titchfield Street and twice round
Oxford Market, you are of opinion that a joke should never be
prolonged beyond the point at which there is danger of its becoming
wearisome; and that the time has now arrived for home and friends.
The "Law," on the other hand, now raised by reinforcements to a
strength of six or seven men, is just beginning to enjoy the chase.
You picture to yourself, while doing Hanover Square, the scene in
Court the next morning. You will be accused of being drunk and
disorderly. It will be idle for you to explain to the magistrate
(or to your relations afterwards) that you were only trying to live
up to a man who did this sort of thing in a book and was admired for
it. You will be fined the usual forty shillings; and on the next
occasion of your calling at the Mayfields' the girls will be out,
and Mrs. Mayfield, an excellent lady, who has always taken a
motherly interest in you, will talk seriously to you and urge you to
sign the pledge.

Thanks to your youth and constitution you shake off the pursuit at
Notting Hill; and, to avoid any chance of unpleasant contretemps on
the return journey, walk home to Bloomsbury by way of Camden Town
and Islington.

I abandoned sportive tendencies as the result of a vow made by
myself to Providence, during the early hours of a certain Sunday
morning, while clinging to the waterspout of an unpretentious house
situate in a side street off Soho. I put it to Providence as man to