at home, I marvelled to find the street crowded with vans, coal-carts, trucks, a mourning coach, fishmongers, butchers, and confectioners with trays, and a number of servants wanting places.  All these were crowding round No. 5, as ordered or advertised for by Mr. Tupper:  of course soon explained away, and rejected, to a general indignation at the hoaxers.  Now, as I had my suspicions, I sat unseen at the front drawing-room window, and watched:  and as more than once I had noticed P. and his friends pass down the street on the opposite side, I taxed them with their exploit on the Monday; and I rather think it cost them not a trifling sum to satisfy that crowd of disappointed tradesmen.  Happily such practical joking is now long since (or ought to be) a social outrage of the past; Hook’s being first had the grace of original humour,—­but imitations are dull repetition, not to be excused.  I only once met Theodore Hook, and that was in his decadence; he looked puffy and only semi-sober; but I recollect with how much deference and expectation the “livener-up” was eagerly surrounded, and how sillily the dupes laughed at every word he uttered, whether humorous or not.

* * * * *

For another last memory of No. 5, in the dining-room whereof Lord Sandwich, who had once lived there, is said to have invented “sandwiches,” I will record this.

In those days of long ago, how well I remember our next-door neighbour, old Lady Cork, “The Dowager-Countess of Cork and Orrery,” as her door-plate proclaimed, some of whose peculiarities I may mention without offence, as they were notorious and (the physicians judged) innocent and venial.  Whenever she found herself alone (and she kept profuse hospitality three or four days a week, with her vast illuminated conservatory full of artificial flowers and grapes and oranges tied on everything), when those famous routs were silent, and dance music no longer kept us awake at night, the little old lady would send in a message, asking “neighbour Tupper to give her a dinner to-day”—­sometimes even coming unannounced.  She usually appeared all in white, even to her shoes and bonnet, which latter she would keep on the whole evening; the only colour about her being rouged cheeks, sometimes decorated with a piece of white paper cut into the shape of a heart, and stuck on “to charm away the tic.”  Well, her ladyship was always full of society anecdotes; and I only wish that her diary may soon be published, as probably a more spicy record of past celebrities than even Pepys’s in old times, or Greville’s in our own; but she is said to have left instructions to her executors not to publish till every one mentioned by her was dead:  so we must wait till that tontine is over.  But the specialty of the aged countess, who died at past ninety but never owned to more than sixty, was a propensity to annex small properties; always it happened that next morning after a visit either her butler or her lady’s-maid would bring to us a spoon or a fork or a piece of bric-a-brac which she had carried off with her in seeming unconsciousness; and as she never inquired for them afterwards, possibly it was so.  Let doctors decide. Requiescat. The forthcoming memoirs of that once famous and lovely Miss Monckton will be interesting indeed, if not over-edited.