Next to this dignitary sat a worthy representative of a race now, alas! long, long extinct, and indeed almost unrecorded. Oh! could old Hall or Holinshed have divined that the _Portingal captain_ would ever become an animal as much extinct as the mammoth or the mastodon, leaving only a few scattered traces to mark the places through which he wandered, what long and elaborate descriptions should we not have had, to bear at least his memory down to coming ages! But in the days of those worthy writers, Portugal, or, as they wrote it, Portingal, was the land from which adventure and discovery issued forth over the earth, ay, and over the water, too; and they never dreamt that the flourishing kingdom whose adventurous seamen explored every corner of the known world, and brought the fruits and treasures of the burning zone to the frigid regions of the north, would ever dwindle away so as to be amongst the nations of Europe like a sprat in a shoal of herrings; or certainly they would have given us a full and particular description of a Portingal captain, from the top of his head down to the sole of his shoe. Luckily, however, the learned Vonderbrugius has supplied this defect more to my purpose than any other writer could have done, not only by describing a Portingal captain in the abstract, but the very identical Portingal captain who there, at that moment, sat by the fireside. I have already hinted that the learned Theban's Latin is somewhat obscure, and I will own that the beginning of his definition rather puzzled me:--"_Capitanus Portingalensis est homo pedibus sex_----" It was very easy to construe the first four words, like a boy at school: _Capitanus Portingalensis_, a Portugal captain; _est homo_, is a man. That was all very natural; but when it came to _pedibus sex_, with six feet, I was very much astonished, till I discovered that the professor meant thus elegantly to express that he was six feet high.