would be provided at fixed intervals, and thus they were enabled to traverse immense distances at full speed. The words used were, I think, as follows: "Itaque conficiunt iter continuo cursu." When I translated these, "So they came to the end of their journey with continual cursing," I was astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable laughter, falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the ebullience of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that "continual cursing" for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done. However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves, by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed, had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian; my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great Russell Street, close to the British Museum. We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work, and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded), that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had never had children. "Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself have experienced, and many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune." He was doubtless thinking of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born. A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for the light it casts on the characters of the two friends: