I thought the soup would choke me. I almost hoped it might. Othello was a mild case of jealousy compared to me, and I felt that strangling would not half glut my vengeance. And how they talked!--he complimenting her on her accent, and she telling him how her first governess was a Hanoverian from Celle, where they are all such purists. There was nothing they did not discuss in those detestable gutturals, and as glibly as if it bad been a language meet for human lips. I could not eat a mouthful, but I drank and watched them. The fellow was not long in betraying himself: he was soon deep in the drama. He knew every play of Schiller by heart, and quoted the Wallenstein, the Bobbers, Don Carlos, and Maria Stuart at will; so, too, was he familiar with Goethe and Leasing. He had all the swinging intonation of the boards, and declaimed so very professionally that, as he concluded a passage, I cried out, without knowing it,-- “Take that for your benefit,--it's the best you have given yet.” Oh, Lord, how they laughed! She covered up her face and smothered it; but he lay back, and, holding the table with both hands, he positively shouted and screamed aloud. I would have given ten years of life for the courage to have thrown my glass of wine in his face; but it was no use. Nature had been a niggard to me in that quarter, and I had to sit and hear it,--exactly so, sit and hear it,--while they made twenty attempts to recover their gravity and behave like ladies and gentlemen, and when, no sooner would they look towards me, than off they were again as bad as before. I revolved a dozen cutting sarcasms, all beginning with, “Whenever I feel assured that you have sufficiently regained the customary calm of good society;” but the dessert was served ere I could complete the sentence, and now they were deep in the lyric poets, Uhland, and Körner, and Freiligrath, and the rest of them. As I listened to their enthusiasm, I wondered why people never went into raptures over a cold in the head. But it was not to end here: there was an old harpsichord in the room, and this he opened and set to work on in that fearful two-handed fashion your German alone understands. The poor old crippled instrument shook on its three legs, while the fourth fell clean off, and the loose wires jangled and jarred like knives in a tray; but he only sang the louder, and her ecstasies grew all the greater too. Heaven reward you, dear old Mrs. Keats, when you sent word down that you could n't sleep a wink, and begging them to “send that noisy band something and let them go away;” and then Miss Herbert wished him a sweet goodnight, and he accompanied her to the door, and then there was more good-night, and I believe I had a short fit; but when I came to myself, he was sitting smoking his cigar opposite me.