MY Dear Agatha,—To take up my story where I dropped it the other night.... You can approach the "Cheshire Cheese" either by the front door in Wine Office Court or by the back door in Cheshire Court. I prefer the tunnel-like passage leading to the back door, it seems a more fit means of transporting one from Fleet Street of to-day to the Fleet Street of 1667.

Mrs. D.'s visions of bread and cheese gave place to something more appetising as the combined odours of steak puddings, mutton chops, baked potatoes, and Irish stew greeted our entrance into the narrow passage where waiters jostled each other and hurled orders, like invectives, at the kitchen upstairs. Walls, panelled to the ceiling, old rough benches, sawdusted floors, a glowing fire burning in the large old-fashioned grate—this was the "Cheshire Cheese" of two hundred and fifty years ago. One crosses the threshold of this homely tavern, and in the twinkling of an eye is admitted to an intimacy with the rude comfort of the past. Brisk waiters were pouring sparkling ale into tankards, and placing before customers plates containing helpings generous enough to satisfy the appetite of a starving man. In the box in the corner, curtained off by a faded crimson frill from the rest of the room, were two vacant places, which Mrs. D. and I took, and from my seat there I could watch the gentleman in the morning coat who serves The Pudding. It occupies the place of honour in the middle of the room, together with an enormous joint of good old English roast beef. The Pudding resembles a mountain of the volcanic order, and into its steaming crater the server, after having cut slices of crust from its sides, delves deep with a long-handled silver ladle, bringing up savoury portions of the mysterious contents.

The waiter brought the menu, but we did not need to study it. To go to the "Cheshire Cheese" without having some of The Pudding is to explore a wine vault without tasting of the vintage stored in the old barrels. By the way, if you want a napkin at "The Cheese" you have to ask for it. The presence of pewter on the tables, and the absence of napkins, is all part of the ritual which strives to keep alive the spirit of those days when, rumour has it, Dr. Johnson frequented the place. As to whether he ever did is one of those disputed points of history which furnish material for conjecture and research with the student of old times. Those who say he didn't base their assumption chiefly on the fact that Boswell never mentioned the "Cheshire Cheese," but even Boswell did not record what Johnson had for dinner every day, or how often he visited his barber. Also, Johnson may have given up frequenting the "Cheshire Cheese" before he knew Boswell. Seeing that Johnson lived just round the corner, it is only reasonable to suppose that now and again he might drop in, especially as his friend Goldsmith, whose visits to the tavern are usually granted, lived almost opposite it. Picture the Doctor, fed up with his collection of quarrelsome old women—Mrs. Williams, Mrs. Desmoulins, Miss Carmichael—not to mention Levet, the eccentric apothecary (Good God, Agatha! was there ever such a victim to good nature?)—Picture him, on some bitter winter's night, putting on his cocked hat, his greatcoat and muffler, taking his stout stick, and banging the door of his asylum behind him with a grunt of satisfaction. How the wind howls through the dark courts! But there are rudy lights in the windows of "The Cheese," and inside a blazing fire, the smoke from a dozen churchwardens, the scent of hot punch, and last but not least, listeners and the companionship of congenial spirits. Whatever Johnson may have done in his life, he certainly haunts the old place in death. One cannot turn one's eyes in any direction without encountering mementoes of the old lexicographer, and there is the brass tablet set in the wall over "The Favourite Seat of Dr. Samuel Johnson". You can't get away from that! "Deny it who can!" says the tablet defiantly, and it suddenly occurred to me that here is another task for Paul Pry—a task more fascinating even than the quest of the "curious sculptured figure," which disappeared so strangely from St. Ethelburga's, Bishopsgate. One could make it the work of a lifetime to find out if Dr. Johnson was in the habit of frequenting the "Cheshire Cheese". Meanwhile, perhaps the problem would have been solved by accident. Some descendant of one of the Doctor's correspondents finds an old letter amidst a bundle of dusty documents that had not seen the light of day for many a long year—a letter in which the Doctor, after giving a vivid account of the Gordon Riots, congratulates himself that Bolt Court is so near the "Cheshire Cheese," it not being safe for respectable citizens to be much abroad in the streets at nights. The letter would be put up to auction, and the "Cheshire Cheese" would run up the bidding....

The waiter placed before me a portion of The Pudding, and Mrs. D. brought me back to realities to ask what I imagined was in it. I told her there was steak in it, oysters, kidneys, and larks, and she said it wasn't fair to the birds. She also subsequently became of the opinion that it wasn't fair to the eaters, when she suffered embarrassment from the tiny bones of the larks. If it was a bloater, said she, you'd know what you were about, and where to look for the bones, but bones in a beef-steak pudding, where you didn't expect them, were a trap for the unwary. I reassured her that I had never heard of an accident, and I had lunched and dined many times at "The Cheese," but I regret to say that The Pudding, from Mrs. D.'s point of view, was not a success.

When paying the bill I said something to the waiter about the Familiar Spirit of the place, and he suggested that we should visit the rooms above. He then went out into the sawdusted passage by the bar, and in exactly the same tone of voice as that with which he ordered chops and steaks, shouted up the stairs, "Charlie, a gentleman to see The Chair".

Whereupon up we went, gathering sawdust on the soles of our shoes as we climbed the twisted staircase, past the kitchen (where The Pudding is cooked in a huge copper boiler which is kept going all night)—at this moment the fizzling, sputtering, steaming scene of a score of culinary activities—past a grandfather clock in the corner which is older than Dr. Johnson himself, and into the room where stands the original chair used by Dr. Johnson at the Mitre Tavern in Chancery Lane, which place, I need hardly add, exists no longer.

There the old chair stands, wide enough and sturdy enough to hold the ponderous form in the snuff-coloured coat with the brass buttons. I hope the wearer of that coat had many a pleasant hour within the wooden arms, now empty with an emptiness never more to be filled apparently. The chair, alas! is enclosed in a glass case, no doubt a necessary precaution, but one which must effectually keep the ghost out of his seat. No self-respecting ghost could condescend to enter a glass case. I should have had the chair standing in a corner of the room where, in some quiet hour, the Doctor might seat himself for a while to recall bygone times in a spot where yesterday still defies to-day.

A night at the "Cheshire Cheese," by the way, might be prolific in ghostly adventure. That grandfather clock on the staircase would have something to say. A clock is, to me, the mouthpiece of a silent house, and after I had visited the bar, to help myself to a drink, and had sat for a while in the Doctor's seat in the dark coffee-room, I should mount the stairs softly, taking the clock unawares. Old clocks are given to thinking aloud, and there's no telling what this one might not reveal.

But I am forgetting—the house would not be as silent as I had been picturing it. There would be another sound close at hand, one to which no stretch of the imagination could impute a ghostly interpretation: the sound of The Pudding bubbling and rumbling in the copper boiler! And the ghosts would reasonably wish to avoid the reminder of a feast in which they are no longer able to participate. Nevertheless, I shall put the "Cheshire Cheese" on the list of places I intend to visit when I'm a ghost myself. Meanwhile, I am just going out to post this and buy an evening paper. It therefore behoves me, dear Agatha, to say,

Adieu.