seems to me that, in spite of all their brilliant gifts, neither Sala nor
Henry Mayhew was fitted to be a correspondent in the field, and they were
certainly much better placed in Paris than at the headquarters of the Army
of the Rhine. Among the resident correspondents who attended the
gatherings at the Grand Cafe were Captain Bingham, Blanchard (son of
Douglas) Jerrold, and the jaunty Bower, who had once been tried for his
life and acquitted by virtue of the "unwritten law" in connection with
an _affaire passionelle_ in which he was the aggrieved party. For more
than forty years past, whenever I have seen a bluff looking elderly
gentleman sporting a buff-waistcoat and a white-spotted blue necktie,
I have instinctively thought of Bower, who wore such a waistcoat and such
a necktie, with the glossiest of silk hats and most shapely of
patent-leather boots, throughout the siege of Paris, when he was fond of
dilating on the merits of boiled ostrich and stewed elephant's foot, of
which expensive dainties he partook at his club, after the inmates of the
Jardin des Plantes had been slaughtered.

Bower represented the _Morning Advertiser_. I do not remember seeing Bowes
of the _Standard_ at the gatherings I have referred to, or Crawford of the
_Daily News_, who so long wrote his Paris letters at a little cafe
fronting the Bourse. But it was certainly at the Grand Cafe that I first
set eyes on Labouchere, who, like Sala, was installed at the neighbouring
Grand Hotel, and was soon to become famous as the _Daily News_' "Besieged
Resident." As for Mr. Thomas Gibson Bowles, who represented the _Morning
Post_ during the German Siege, I first set eyes on him at the British
Embassy, when he had a beautiful little moustache (which I greatly envied)
and wore his hair nicely parted down the middle. _Eheu! fugaces labuntur
anni_.

Sala was the life and soul of those gatherings at the Grand Cafe, always