The teeth which Gardette furnished me are the admiration of all companies; and I speak with only a perceptible click produced by the play of the gold and porcelain. Yet what I say is evidently less relished than when I used to be in blue broad-cloth and hair-powder, and with six unstarched cravats about my neck. My Latin quotations are unintelligible, for I retain the old continental sound of the vowels, and cannot break my organs into the Anglicism of _payter_, _frayter_, and _nigh-sigh_, for _pater_, _frater_, and _nisi_. I can’t learn to change the Spanish _Quijote_ into Quixotte, with a double T; or to talk “of paying over _over_ ten dollars,” when I mean “paying over more than ten dollars.” Alice has never found her favorite “reliable” in any English author before the days of Sir Robert Peel; or any classic writer who ever uttered the phrase “_on_ to-morrow.” I am old-fashioned enough to present to each other visitors who meet at a morning call, and to show them to the door; nor can I wear my hat in the house, bald as I am. _Quere._ Whether Methusalem had these disabilities in proportion to his longinquity? ----- [1] I may be in error, but so my Commissionaire Jean d’Ypres told me. CHAPTER XVI. “He is insensibly subdued To settled quiet; he is one by whom All effort seems forgotten: one to whom Long patience hath such mild composure given, That patience now doth seem a thing of which He hath no need.” Wordsworth. They say old age is cold, but this summer weather boils my blood, and drives me to every corner where a little motion among the leaves affords a surmise of gentle airs. Which reminds me of the comic sufferings of my friend Pfeffers, when first he made trial of our cis-atlantic climate. He so panted and perspired, that we feared he might go off in a paroxysm of some tropical disease. It was many a long year ago, yet Pfeffers is still alive; by this token, that he is my guest at this present writing. His tongue retains a few scarcely perceptible Shibboleths of his German original. Long ago, he threw himself heart and soul into our American usages, and married an American wife. Age sits lightly on him. He is brown, and square built, and he dresses young. An auburn wig surmounts his mahogany visage with formidable dignity. Pfeffers is an ornithologist, and—with a zeal almost furious—has traversed all our Southern States in pursuit of the fowls of the air. That he has escaped poisoning himself with the arsenic which he uses in his taxidermy is to be ascribed to the volumes of tobacco-smoke which he has inhaled during half a century.