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Lord John had lived there so long because he liked the view. He of course looked over the Green Park into the very eye of her late August Majesty Queen Victoria, and on the left of her there were the towers of Westminster and on the right Buckingham Palace. He stood, his legs widely planted, his thick back steadily set, like a captain directing his vessel, and for more than twenty years now had he thus sailed over that green misty sea, and always the farther he sailed, the farther did her August Majesty discreetly withdraw!

But he was not ruffled by this frustration. He rejoiced in it, and he rejoiced also in the spume and froth thrown up at his very feet, and felt as he looked down at the cascades and jets of humanity tossed fruitlessly at his walls all the pride of a good old mariner in his taut and seaworthy vessel.

To a visitor primed with his best cognac tossing his head he would say: "Just look at 'em! Pretty busy, what? And yet in here with the windows closed you can't hear a sound. And even with 'em open it don't worry you." And here he would look round upon his walls, upon the reproductions of Wheatley's "Street Cries"—the mezzotints, the "Ladies Waldegrave," and the others were in the little dining-room—and the old French clock with the naked Diana in gold, and the Louis XVI. sofa and chairs, and the glass bookcases with the bound sets of Madame de Sévigné and Saint-Simon, and the ten volumes of The Mistresses of the Kings of France, and, primed also with his own excellent cognac, would feel kindly and amiable and entirely optimistic about everything.