agreeable society of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with Oliver Goldsmith
and Dick Swiveller and Colonel Newcome to clink ghostly glasses amid the
punch fumes and tobacco smoke. In short I knew London when it was still Old
London--the knowledge of Temple Bar and Cheapside--before the vandal horde
of progress and the pickaxe of the builder had got in their nefarious work.



III


Not long after we began our sojourn in London, I recurred--by chance, I am
ashamed to say--to Mrs. Scott's letter of introduction to her brother. The
address read "Mr. Thomas H. Huxley, School of Mines, Jermyn Street." Why,
it was but two or three blocks away, and being so near I called, not
knowing just who Mr. Thomas H. Huxley might be.

I was conducted to a dark, stuffy little room. The gentleman who met me was
exceedingly handsome and very agreeable. He greeted me cordially and we
had some talk about his relatives in America. Of course my wife and I were
invited at once to dinner. I was a little perplexed. There was no one to
tell me about Huxley, or in what way he might be connected with the School
of Mines.

It was a good dinner. There sat at table a gentleman by the name of Tyndall
and another by the name of Mill--of neither I had ever heard--but there was
still another of the name of Spencer, whom I fancied must be a literary
man, for I recalled having reviewed a clever book on Education some four
years agone by a writer of that name; a certain Herbert Spencer, whom I
rightly judged might he be.