We English seem to have selected the mouse as an emblem in our ‘As dumb as a mouse;’ the French have preferred a glass, for they say, ‘As dumb as a glass.’ We say, ‘As deaf as a post;’ the French, ‘As deaf as a pot.’ ‘As dull as ditch-water,’ Gallicised becomes, ‘As sad as a nightcap.’ ‘Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched,’ is changed into, ‘Don’t sell the skin of a bear before having killed it.’ Instead of, ‘Biting off one’s nose to spite one’s face,’ a similarly useless experiment is illustrated by ‘Spitting in the air that it may fall on one’s nose.’ The self-evident impossibility in the words, ‘You can’t get blood out of a stone,’ is represented by, ‘One could not comb a thing that has no hair.’ (This last also ‘goes without saying,’ which, as literally translated from the French, now forms a proverb in our own language.) In the proverb, ‘One man may lead a horse to the water, but a hundred can’t make him drink,’ our neighbours have not inappropriately selected an ‘ass’ as the illustrative animal. ‘When you’re in Rome, you must do as Rome does,’ every Englishman will tell you; though few perhaps could say why Rome was chosen as an example; and whether it is more necessary, when in Rome, to follow the general lead, than in anywhere else, is to us a matter of doubt. To the Frenchman, the idea is sufficiently well expressed, however, by impressing upon you the necessity of ‘howling with the wolves.’ ‘Easy come, easy go,’ though terse and to the point, is in itself scarcely so intelligible as the somewhat longer sentence, ‘That which comes with the flood, returns with the ebb.’ That ‘a burnt child dreads the fire’ is perfectly true, as every one will admit: our neighbours go farther than this, and, in choosing a ‘scalded cat’ as the object of consideration, speak of it as being in fear of ‘cold’ water even, thus expressing the natural distrust of the cat, after having once been scalded, as extending even to ‘cold’ water. ‘Money makes the mare to go;’ and ‘For money, dogs dance.’ The advisability of ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ is very seldom questioned; in France the recommendation simply takes the form, ‘Do not wake a sleeping cat.’ In England at least, it is said that ‘Birds of a feather flock together;’ or, to put it less poetically, ‘Those who resemble, assemble.’ Naturally, ‘A thief is set to catch a thief;’ or, in other words, ‘A good cat to a good rat;’ ‘A thief and a half to a thief.’ Evidently one thief is not always sufficient; more are required at times. That ‘Practice makes perfect’ is equally true with ‘It is in forging that one becomes a blacksmith.’ And speaking of an ‘ill wind that blows nobody good,’ the fact that ‘to _some one_, misfortune is good,’ is equally applicable, if the phrase were not un-English. The cat seems to figure rather prominently in French proverbs. Instead of buying a ‘pig in a poke,’ ‘a cat in a bag’ is often spoken of.