"Alderman Noakes.  Recalls sweet memories, eh, old sport?  That summer idyll in our early youth—law! what ages ago it seems!  ’But ah! how it was sweet!’  That’s Browning, old man; not my own, I assure you.  I seem to see, down the dim vista of departed years, the figure of our Noakes, smothered in half-consumed carbon, otherwise soot; and again the same Noakes, sprawling in a purling stream; and yet again the same Noakes, affectionately embracing his mother earth—various phases of Noakes concurrent with the flow of ideas in the cerebellum of——"