her sisterhood in poetry and picture than in real life.  Let us turn away from her, lest a touch too apt should compel her stately and cold and soft and womanly grace to gleam out upon my page with a strange repulsion and unattainableness in the very spell that made her beautiful.  At her side, and familiarly attentive to her, sat a gentleman of whom I remember only a hard outline of the nose and forehead, and such a monstrous portent of a beard that you could discover no symptom of a mouth, except when he opened it to speak, or to put in a morsel of food.  Then, indeed, you suddenly became aware of a cave hidden behind the impervious and darksome shrubbery.  There could be no doubt who this gentleman and lady were.  Any child would have recognized them at a glance.  It was Bluebeard and a new wife (the loveliest of the series, but with already a mysterious gloom overshadowing her fair young brow) travelling in their honey-moon, and dining, among other distinguished strangers, at the Lord-Mayor’s table.

After an hour or two of valiant achievement with knife and fork came the dessert; and at the point of the festival where finger-glasses are usually introduced, a large silver basin was carried round to the guests, containing rose-water, into which we dipped the ends of our napkins and were conscious of a delightful fragrance, instead of that heavy and weary odor, the hateful ghost of a defunct dinner.  This seems to be an ancient custom of the city, not confined to the Lord-Mayor’s table, but never met with westward of Temple Bar.

During all the feast, in accordance with another ancient custom, the origin or purport of which I do not remember to have heard, there stood a man in armor, with a helmet on his head, behind his Lordship’s chair.  When the after-dinner wine was placed on the table, still another official personage appeared behind the chair, and proceeded to make a solemn and sonorous proclamation, (in which he enumerated the principal guests, comprising three or four noblemen, several baronets, and plenty of generals, members of Parliament, aldermen, and other names of the illustrious, one of which sounded strangely familiar to my ears,) ending in some such style as this:  “and other gentlemen and ladies, here present, the Lord-Mayor drinks to you all in a loving-cup,”—­giving a sort of sentimental twang to the two words,—­“and sends it round among you!” And forthwith the loving-cup—­several of them, indeed, on each side of the tables—­came slowly down with all the antique ceremony.

The fashion of it is thus.  The Lord-Mayor, standing up and taking the covered cup in both hands, presents it to the guest at his elbow, who likewise rises, and removes the cover for his Lordship to drink, which being successfully accomplished, the guest replaces the cover and receives the cup into his own hands.  He then presents it to his next neighbor, that the cover may be again removed for himself to take a draught, after which the third person goes through a similar