DECEMBER 125 



in those days. At Eosin's once in three weeks we were 

 marched off to some bains where we could enjoy a 

 good wash in a warm bath and a surreptitious cake of 

 chocolate, provided by the garqon de bains for a con- 

 sideration. So there were great washings on the Saturday 

 nights at the hotel, superintended by our dear mother, after 

 our return from the " Fra^ais," where we were always 

 taken on the Saturday evenings for a lesson in French. 

 Rachel was just coming into celebrity, and we sat through 

 the long and, to us, unexciting Racine plays in which she 

 appeared, rather sleepy after a dinner at a restaurant and 

 an afternoon of exceptional interest, driving about the 

 streets. Those strictly classical plays, in which the three 

 unities are rigidly observed, were very tedious to us boys, 

 and the prospect of an ice at Tortoni's on the way home 

 was more engrossing, I am ashamed to own, than the 

 passionate scenes rendered by the great actress. 



' I remember while at Rosin's going sometimes to spend 

 the afternoon and dine at Lord Elgin's, the hero of the 

 Elgin Marbles acquisition. He seemed to me then a very 

 old man, and always sitting at a writing-table in a corner 

 of a large room in their house in the Faubourg St. 

 Germain, while his daughters performed the up-hill duty 

 of trying to amuse me, a stupid, shy boy of eleven. I 

 was also taken out by other friends of my father's, and 

 can recall the intense sleepiness following an unwonted 

 dinner at seven o'clock, before the time came for being 

 packed off in a fiacre to the Avenue Chateaubriand. 



' But the time came when Augustus and I, both des- 

 tined for the army, had to prepare, he for Woolwich and I 

 for Sandhurst. It was decided that we should go to a 

 great preparatory school of those days for the military 

 colleges of the Queen's and East India Company's ser- 

 vices, kept by Messrs. Stoton and Mayor at Wimbledon. 

 The school was a large one, and would be thought a 



