I have said that Henley seldom came to us-as indeed he seldom went anywhere or, for that matter, seldom stayed at home-without a contingent of his Young Men in attendance.

I do not believe I could ever have gone to his rooms in Great College Street, or to his house at Addiscombe, or in later, sadder days to the other, rather gloomy, house on the riverside at Barnes,-turned into some sort of college the last time I passed, with a long bare students' table in the downstairs dining-room where I had been warmed and thrilled by so much exhilarating talk,-that some of his Young Men were not there before me or did not come in before I left. In London, on his journeys to and fro, they surrounded him as a bodyguard. If on those old Thursday nights, his was the loudest voice, theirs played up to it untiringly. There were no half measures about them. As warriors in the cause of art and literature, they reserved nothing from their devotion to their leader, they exhausted every possibility of that form of flattery usually considered the greatest. They fought Henley's battles with hardly less valour, hardly milder roaring. On Thursday, they had been working with him all day and all evening, they probably had lunched together, and dined together, and yet so far from showing any desire to separate on their arrival in our rooms, they immediately grouped themselves again round Henley.

It was curious, anyway, how strong the tendency was with all the company to break up into groups. Work was the common bond, but there was also a special bond in each different kind of work. On my round as hostess I was sure to find the writers in one corner, the artists in another, the architects in a third-though to this day it is a question with me why we should have had enough architects to make a group and, more puzzling, why, having them, they should have been so unpopular, unless it was because of their air of prosperity and respectability, always as correct in appearance as if there was a possible client at the door. I can still recall the triumphant glee, out of all proportion to the cause, of one of Henley's Young Men the Thursday night he came to tell me that all the architects were safe out of the way in the studio, and "I have shut both doors," he added, "and now that we are rid of them we can talk." As if any of Henley's Young Men under any circumstances ever did anything else.

Some of Henley's staff, if I remember, never came to us, others came only occasionally, but a few failed us as rarely as Henley himself. The Thursday night was the exception that did not see Charles Whibley at Henley's right hand even as he was in the pages of the National Observer, not merely ready for the fight but provoking it, insisting upon it, forcing it, boisterous in battle, looking like an undergraduate, talking like a pastmaster of the art of invective, with a little stammer that gave point to his lightest commonplace. Rarely lagging very far behind came Marriott Watson, young, tall, blonde, good-looking-a something exotic, foreign in the good looks that I put down to New Zealand, for I suppose New Zealand as well as America has produced a type-not quite so truculent in talk as in print, more inclined to fight with a smile. A third was Wilfred Pollock, forgotten save by his friends I am afraid; and a fourth, Vernon Blackburn, who began life as a monk at Fort Augustus and finished it as a musical critic, he too I fear scarcely more than a name; and a fifth, Jack Stuart, and a sixth, Harold Parsons, and a seventh, and an eighth, and I can hardly now say how many more long since dead, now for me vague ghosts from out that old past so overflowing with life.

When William Waldorf Astor bought the Pall Mall Gazette and started the weekly Pall Mall Budget and the monthly Pall Mall Magazine, he presented Henley with two or three new Young Men and added to our company on Thursday nights, little as he had either of these achievements in view. His plunge into newspaper proprietorship was one of the newspaper ventures that counted for most in the Nineties. It was a venture inclining to amateurism in detail, but run on business, not romantic, lines and therefore it was less talked about than those purely amateur plunges into journalism which gave the Nineties so much of their picturesqueness. But all the same, we saw revolution in it, the possibility of wholesale regeneration, the inauguration of a new era, when "sham" would be exposed, and "Bleat" silenced, and art grow "Human" once more. In the Budget and the Magazine it was likewise to be proved that America and France were not alone in understanding and valuing the art of illustration:-vain hopes!

Henley and his Young Men rejoiced in a new sphere for fighting, certain of a brilliant victory, since they were to have a share in the command. Astor, with a fine fling for independence-his only one in public-or else with that old gentlemanly dream of a newspaper "written by gentlemen for gentlemen," had captured his editors in regions where editors are not usually hunted-Henry Cust, heir to a title, for the Gazette, Lord Frederick Hamilton, his title already inherited, for the Magazine. Fleet Street shrugged its shoulders, laughed a little, not believing title and rank to have the same value in journalism as in society. Cust, to do him justice, agreed with Fleet Street, and, knowing that he was without experience, had the sense to appeal for help to those with it. By good luck he went to Henley, who was not free to do much for the paper save give it his advice, offer it those of his Young Men whom he could spare, and take under his wing the new Young Men it invented for itself. When new enthusiasts fell into Henley's train, it was never long before they followed him to Buckingham Street on Thursday nights.

I could scarcely label as anybody's Young Man Iwan-Müller, huge, half Russian, half English, all good comrade, who had come up from Manchester and the editorship of a leading paper there to be Cust's Assistant Editor. He was nearly Henley's contemporary, but he did not, for such a trifle as age, let any one of Henley's Young Men exceed him in devotion, and his laugh became the unfailing accompaniment of Henley's talk, so much so that I am convinced if Henley still leads the talk in the land beyond the grave, Iwan-Müller still punctuates it with the big bracing laugh that was as big as himself.

Photograph by Frederick Hollyer

IWAN-MüLLER AND GEORGE W. STEEVENS

At the other extreme, younger than the youngest of the Young Men he joined, came George W. Steevens, fresh from Oxford, Balliol Prize Scholar, shy and carrying it off, in the Briton's way, with appalling rudeness and more appalling silence. I remember J., upon whose nerves as well as mine this silence got, taking me apart one Thursday evening to tell me that if that young Oxford prig was too superior to talk to anybody, why then he was too superior to come to us at all, and he must be made to understand it. Eventually he learned to talk, with us anyway-he was always a silent man with most people. And I got to know him well, to like him, to admire him,-to respect him too through the long summer when his friends were doing their best to dissuade him from his proposed marriage with a woman many years older than he. The men of the National Observer and the Pall Mall were such keen fighters that they could not be kind or sentimental-and they grew maudlinly sentimental over Steevens's engagement-without a fight for it. They thought he was making a mistake, forgetting that it was his business, not theirs, if he was. He fought alone against them, but he held his place like a man and won. Our Thursday nights had come to an end before he went to America, to Germany, to Khartoum with Kitchener, to South Africa, where he passed into the great silence that no protest of ours, or any man's can break. If his work was overrated, he himself as I knew him was as kind and brave as in Henley's verse to his memory.

Others of the same group, the writers' group, who flit across the scene in my memory are less intimately associated with Henley. Harold Frederic wrote for him occasionally-wrote few things, indeed, more amusing than his Observations in Philistia, a satire first published in the National Observer-but his chief business was the novel and the New York Times correspondence. He was an able man, something more than the typical clever American journalist, a writer of books that deserve to be remembered but that have hardly outlived him. He was an amusing companion, the sort of man it was delightful to run across by chance in unexpected places, for which reason my most agreeable recollections of him are not in Buckingham Street but in the streets and cafés of Berlin and Vienna that summer he was studying Jews in Southeastern Europe, and first knew there were Jews in Vienna when J., who afterwards began to study them for himself, introduced him to the Juden Gasse. He liked a good dinner, and gave us more than one, and he was an amusing talker over it and also on our Thursday nights until he got to the stage he always did get to of telling tales of his boyhood when he carried milk to the big people in his part of the Mohawk Valley, was dazzled by his first vision of Brussels carpet on their floors, and determined to have Brussels carpet on his own before he was many years older, and I can answer for it that, by the time I knew him, his house was all Brussels carpet from top to bottom. They were most creditable tales and entertaining too at a first hearing, but they staled, as all tales must, with repetition.

S.R. Crockett never wrote anything for Henley. Henley would have been outraged by the bare suggestion, and Crockett the writer was never handled with the gloves by Henley's Young Men in the National Observer. But with Crockett himself they had no quarrel. We all liked him-a large red and white Scotchman, the Scots strong in every word he spoke, hustling us all off for a fish dinner at Greenwich on the strength of his first big cheque for royalties; or as happy to spend the evening sitting on our floor and diverting William Penn with the ball of paper on the end of a string that William never wearied of pursuing, partly for his amusement, partly because, with his innate politeness, he knew it contributed to ours.

I cannot imagine a Thursday night without Rosamund Marriott-Watson,-Graham R. Tomson as she was then,-beautiful, reminiscent of Rossetti in her tall, willowy slimness, with her long neck like a column and her great halo of black hair and her big brown eyes, appealing, confinding, beseeching. Fashion as she, the poetess, extolled it week by week in the National Observer, became a poem with a stately measure in frocks and hats, a flowing rhythm in every frill and furbelow. I lost sight of her later, for reasons neither here nor there, but it pleases me to know that not many months before her death she looked back to those years as her happiest when weekly, almost daily, she was going up and down the Buckingham Street stairs which her ghost, she said, must haunt until they go the way of too many old stairs leading up to old London chambers. Violet Hunt was almost as faithful. And both contributed, as I did, a weekly column-mine that amazing article on cookery-to the Pall Mall's daily Wares of Autolycus, daily written by women and I daresay believed by us to be the most entertaining array of unconsidered trifles that any Autolycus had ever offered to any eager world. Graham Tomson was even moved to commemorate our collaboration in verse the inspiration of which is not far to seek, but of which all I remember now is the beginning:

O, there's Mrs. Meynell and Mrs. Pennell,

There's Violet Hunt and me!

for Mrs. Meynell contributed a fourth column, though she never contributed her presence to Buckingham Street.

Once or twice, George Moore hovered from group to group, his childlike eyes of wonder protruding, wide open, and his ears open too, no doubt, for, if I can judge from his several books of reminiscences, his ears have rarely been closed to talk going on about him. After reading the Irish series I should suspect him not only of well-opened ears but of an inexhaustible supply of cuffs safely stored up his sleeves. Bernard Shaw honoured us occasionally, but I have learned that, bent as he is upon talking about himself, whatever he has to say, he grows more fastidious when others talk about him and say what they have to. Now and then, Henry Norman, journalist, his title and seat in Parliament yet to come, dropped in. Now and then Miss Preston and Miss Dodge came, both in London to finish in the British Museum the studies begun in Rome. Rarely a week passed that James G. Legge was not with us, then deep in his work at the Home Office but full of joy in everything that was most joyful in the Nineties-its fights, its books, its prints, its posters. And I might name many besides, some forgotten, some dead, some seen no more by me, life being often more cruel than death in the separations and divisions it makes. But two voices above the others are almost as persistent in my ears as Henley's-the voices of Bob Stevenson and Henry Harland.