(By permission, from a picture in the possession of James Donald, Esq.)

[Engraved by Whymper.

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CHAPTER I.

EORGE DOLMER DELAMERE, Esq., being advertised to lecture in the Athenæum Hall, Bondage Road, Houndsditch, under the auspices of the Moral Tone Association, I paid my threepence, secured thereby a right of entry to the reserved seats and went in to listen. I was at this time an idle man (not I think from any fault of mine), and anxious to find some business which should bring in butter for that necessary daily loaf which was already provided for me by a kindly fortune. In the hope that I might one day find a literary use for the knowledge I was picking up by bits and scraps, I had devoted myself for some months to the study of life and manners in various corners of London, and was in the habit of making enthusiastic and copious notes. George Dolmer Delamere, Esq., was known to me as to almost everybody by name, and the doings of the Moral Tone Association had been trumpeted in the newspapers of late.

I sat down and waited in a waste little room and had ample time to look about me. There were thirty or forty people already present, and at intervals of a minute or so, a new comer would appear, smoothing his hair furtively, and creaking to a seat on tiptoe as though he were afraid of awaking the echoes. People coughed apologetically and shuffled their feet, and sat apart from one another. The place and everybody in it had an air of penance, and so far as one might judge from appearances the Gospel of the Moral Tone was not gay or popular. The

audience was made up mainly of youngish men, most of whom looked thoughtful and earnest. They were ill at ease because they were not used to society, and they were evidently anxious to observe and evidently anxious to be unobserved.

When we had sat in a shuffling and uneasy silence for a quarter of an hour a dapper man opened a door at the back of the room and looked in. The scattered assembly applauded, and the dapper man disappeared; but a few minutes later returned at the head of a string of ladies and gentlemen who, in accompaniment to a dropping fire of handclapping, advanced to a low platform and took their seats upon it. The leader took his place at a red-clad table in the centre, and at his right sat a gentleman whose very aspect was a lesson in tone. He was tall and slender and stately, and he condescended from his crown to his heels in every attitude and movement. His face was refined and capable, and he smiled in a complex way, which expressed curiosity, and affable pity, and a profound allowance all at once. He had a tall, bald forehead; silky white hair, rather unusually long; long, narrow hands of extraordinary whiteness and delicacy; and a mouth which, in the intervals of his smile, looked a trifle peevish and disappointed. He was in evening dress and would have looked remarkable and distinguished anywhere. Here he was as remarkable as a stag in a herd of cart-horses. I supposed this gentleman to be George Dolmer Delamere, Esq., and the dapper man in the chair confirmed my supposition by his introductory speech.

Mr. Delamere, he told us, was a gentleman