We lived then in London at Chesterfield House, South Audley Street, which covered three times the amount of ground it does at present, for at the back it had a very large garden, on which Chesterfield Gardens are now built.  In addition to this it had two wings at right angles to it, one now occupied by Lord Leconfield’s house, the other by Nos. 1 and 2, South Audley Street.  The left-hand wing was used as our stables and contained a well which enjoyed an immense local reputation in Mayfair.  Never was such drinking-water!  My father allowed any one in the neighbourhood to fetch their drinking-water from our well, and one of my earliest recollections is watching the long daily procession of men-servants in the curious yellow-jean jackets of the “sixties,” each with two large cans in his hands, fetching the day’s supply of our matchless water.  No inhabitants of Curzon Street, Great Stanhope Street, or South Audley Street would dream of touching any water but that from the famous Chesterfield House spring.  In 1867 there was a serious outbreak of Asiatic cholera in London, and my father determined to have the water of the celebrated spring analysed.  There were loud protests at this:—­what, analyse the finest drinking-water in England!  My father, however, persisted, and the result of the analysis was that our incomparable drinking-water was found to contain thirty per cent. of organic matter.  The analyst reported that fifteen per cent. of the water must be pure sewage.  My father had the spring sealed and bricked up at once, but it is a marvel that we had not poisoned every single inhabitant of the Mayfair district years before.

In the early “sixties” the barbarous practice of sending wretched little “climbing boys” up chimneys to sweep them still prevailed.  In common with most other children of that day, I was perfectly terrified when the chimney-sweep arrived with his attendant coal-black imps, for the usual threat of foolish nurses to their charges when they proved refractory was, “If you are not good I shall give you to the sweep, and then you will have to climb up the chimney.”  When the dust-sheets laid on the floors announced the advent of the sweeps, I used, if possible, to hide until they had left the house.  I cannot understand how public opinion tolerated for so long the abominable cruelty of forcing little boys to clamber up flues.  These unhappy brats were made to creep into the chimneys from the grates, and then to wriggle their way up by digging their toes into the interstices of the bricks, and by working their elbows and knees alternately; stifled in the pitch-darkness of the narrow flue by foul air, suffocated by the showers of soot that fell on them, perhaps losing their way in the black maze of chimneys, and liable at any moment, should they lose their footing, to come crashing down twenty feet, either to be killed outright in the dark or to lie with a broken limb until they were extricated—­should, indeed, it