‘The method he pursued is instructive. He found out where Italians might be expected to meet, and went every evening to sit among them and hear them talk. Thus, there was in those days a _café_ in Titchborne Street frequented by Italian refugees, political exiles, and republicans. Here Palmer sat and listened and presently began to talk, and so became an ardent partisan of Italian unity. There was also at that time—I think many of them have now migrated to Hammersmith—a great colony of Italian organ-grinders and sellers of plaster-cast images in and about Saffron Hill. He went among these worthy people, sat with them in their restaurants, drank their sour wine, talked with them, and acquired their _patois_. He found out Italian waiters at restaurants and talked with them; at the docks he went on board Italian ships, and talked with the sailors; and in these ways learned the various dialects of Genoa, Naples, Nice, Livorno, Venice, and Messina. One of his friends at this time was a well-known Signor Buonocorre, the so-called “Fire King,” who used to astonish the multitude nightly at Cremorne Gardens and elsewhere by his feats. For Palmer was always attracted by people who run shows, “do” things, act, pretend, persuade, deceive, and in fact are interesting for any kind of cleverness. However, the first result of this perseverance was that he made himself a perfect master of Italian, that he knew the country speech as well as the Italian of the schools, and that he could converse with the Piedmontese, the Venetian, the Roman, the Sicilian, or the Calabrian, in their own dialects, as well as with the purest native of Florence. ‘Also while he was in the City he acquired French by a similar process. I do not know whether he carried on his French studies at the same time with the Italian, but I believe not. It seems certainly more in accordance with the practice which he adopted in after life that he should attempt only one thing at a time. But as with Italian so with French; he joined to a knowledge of the pure language a curious acquaintance with _argot_; also—which points to acquaintance made in _cafés_—he acquired somehow in those early days a curious knowledge and admiration of the French police and detective system[90].’