text:  Our guests were of that class which usually fills the houses of noblemen in the annihilation of life in town; clubmen to whom St James's Street was the terraqueous globe; guardsmen on leave of absence for the shooting season and saturated with London; several older exhibitors in the fashionable circles who as naturally followed where young guardsmen and wealthy squires were to be found as flies wing to the honey on which they live; and two or three of the most opulent and dullest baronets who ever played whist and billiards for the advantage of losing guinea points to gentlemen more accomplished in the science of chances