author's address at his publishers." "Now let us go back to our
muttons," as Barney Coyle used to say in the Dublin Library formerly
--for Barney was fond of French allusions, which occasionally too he
gave in their own tongue, as once describing an interview with Lord
Cloncurry, in which he broke off suddenly the conference, adding, "I
told him I never could consent to such a proposition, and putting my
chateau (chapeau) on my head, I left the house at once."

It was nearly three o'clock in the morning, as accompanied by the
waiter, who, like others of his tribe, had become a kind of somnambulist
ex-officio, I wended my way up one flight of stairs, and down another,
along a narrow corridor, down two steps, through an antechamber, and
into another corridor, to No. 82, my habitation for the night. Why I
should have been so far conducted from the habitable portion of the
house I had spent my evening in, I leave the learned in such matters to
explain; as for me, I have ever remarked it, while asking for a chamber
in a large roomy hotel, the singular pride with which you are ushered up
grand stair-cases, down passages, through corridors, and up narrow back
flights, till the blue sky is seen through the sky-light, to No. 199,
"the only spare bed-room in the house," while the silence and desolation
of the whole establishment would seem to imply far otherwise--the only
evidence of occupation being a pair of dirty Wellingtons at the door of
No. 2.

"Well, we have arrived at last," said I, drawing a deep sigh, as I threw
myself upon a ricketty chair, and surveyed rapidly my meagre-looking
apartment.

"Yes, this is Monsieur's chamber," said the waiter, with a very peculiar
look, half servile, half droll. "Madame se couche, No. 28."