While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant, _half-protege_ in a family near us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know this, and innocently asked him one day if _los Gallegos no son los Irlandeses d'Espana_?--if the Gallicians were not the Irish of Spain--which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day "Don Quixote" demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I said before, I learn languages with _incredible_ difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of _Shelta_ in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good constitution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel--and she might have added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me from my school persecutors, and _amusement_ in a healthy sense, of which I had almost none whatever.