Let me add now a word of kindly memory for some good friends long gone to a better world, but once welcome guests at Albury.  There was Benjamin Nightingale, the enthusiastic antiquary; there was his fidus Achates, Akerman, secretary to the Numismatic, whom I greatly pleased by enabling him to catch a trout near my carriage gate; there was Chief Baron Pollok, head of the Noviomagians:  the eloquent Edwards Lester of America, whose speech at a Literary Fund dinner to which I had treated him was hailed by Hallam, Dickens, and others on the spot as the speech of the Society:  and the Warrens of Troy, N.Y., about whose casual visit this singular thing happened.  For the first and only time in life I had had the strange luck to catch at Netley Pond three perch of nearly a pound each, and a fine trout of about two:  I little knew then the final cause thereof:  in those days we could not easily get fish in the country, unless indeed we caught it:  now my eminent Transatlantic stranger friends came on a Friday, and proved to be Roman Catholics:  could any piscatorial luck have been more timely?

When a few days after I told of my sport to a neighbour (it was Captain Russell of the Cleveland family), a great angler, he, of course, without imputation of my veracity, hinted that he wished I might have such luck again, as he would then come and dine with me.  I answered at once, “Come to-morrow, and see what I may have caught.”  He did,—­and I produced from the same old mill-head a three-pound trout,—­to his astonishment, as it had been my own to have caught it.  I have never had such luck before or since, though always a zealous angler in an unprofessional way.

Let me not forget here also the beautiful “Albury Waltz,” composed in my drawing-room by Miss Armstrong, and published—­it must be twenty years ago now—­by Robert Cocks, New Burlington Street:  wherein by request I originated the idea of song words for the dancers.  This singing as you danced has been often done since, but I suppose no one then thought of it but myself since King David.  I need say little more about Albury visitors:—­for many years there were plenty of them,—­but if one put down a tenth part of what even the faithless memory of old age still retains, there would be no end to such inexhaustible recordings.

And here is an Alburian anecdote which may amuse, as illustrative of the mental calibre of some of those myriads of untutored rustics whom our partisan governors have made politically equal with the wisest in the land.  Three young friends came to spend a day with us, and for fun brought in their pockets the absurd noses popular at Epsom races.  We came upon some turf-diggers, and my visitors mounted their masks to mystify them.  The clodpoles looked scared and very quiet, till I went up to one of them who knew me,—­of course I was in my natural physiognomy,—­and I said to him, “My friend, these are foreigners:”  and the poor ignoramus staring at those portentous noses said seriously, “Ees, I sees they be.”  Clearly he thought all “furriners” were so featured.