eyelids grow very heavy as midnight approaches.  When at length it ended, and my fellow-page was curled up fast asleep on the steps of the throne in his official finery, in glancing at my father I was amazed to find him prematurely aged.  The powder from eight hundred cheeks and necks had turned his moustache and beard white; he had to retire to his room and spend a quarter of an hour washing and brushing the powder out, before he could take part in the procession through all the staterooms which in those days preceded supper.  My father was still a remarkably handsome man even at fifty-six years of age, with his great height and his full curly beard, and I thought my mother, with all her jewels on, most beautiful, as I am quite sure she was, though only a year younger than my father.

The great white-and-gold throne-room brilliant with light, the glitter of the uniforms, and the sparkle of the jewels were attractive from their very novelty to a ten-year-old schoolboy, perhaps a little overwhelmed by his own gorgeous and unfamiliar trappings.  We two pages had been ordered to stand quite motionless, one on either side of the throne, but as the evening wore on and we began to feel sleepy, it was difficult to carry our instructions into effect, for there were no facilities for playing even a game of “oughts and crosses” in order to keep awake.  The position had its drawbacks, as we were so very conspicuous in our new uniforms.  A detail which sticks in my memory is that the guests at that Drawing-Room drank over three hundred bottles of my father’s sherry, in addition to other wines.

My brother and I were not allowed in the throne-room on ordinary days, but it offered such wonderful opportunities for processions and investitures, with the sword of state and the mace lying ready to one’s hand in their red velvet cradles, that we soon discovered a back way into it.  Should any of the staff of Lord French, the present Viceroy, care to examine the sword of state and the mace, they will find them both heavily dented.  This is due to two small boys having frequently dropped them when they proved too heavy for their strength, during strictly private processions fifty-five years ago.  I often wonder what a deputation from the Corporation of Belfast must have thought when they were ushered into the throne-room, and found it already in the occupation of two small brats, one of whom, with a star cut out of silver paper pinned to his packet to counterfeit an order, was lolling back on the throne in a lordly manner, while the other was feigning to read a long statement from a piece of paper.  The small boys, after the manner of their kind, quickly vanished through a bolt-hole.