Brussels. I have lost all my memoranda! I cannot find them any where. Well-- children are a great blessing when they are kept in the nursery--but they certainly do interfere a little with a papa who has the misfortune to be an author. I little thought, when my youngest girl brought me up a whole string of paper dolls, hanging together by the arms, that they had been cut off my memoranda. But so it was; and when I had satisfactorily established the fact, and insisted upon an inquisition to recover my invaluables, I found that they had had an auto-da-fe, and that the whole string of dolls, which contained on their petticoats my whole string of bewitching ideas, had been burnt like so many witches. But as the man said in the packet--"Is that all?" Oh, no!--they come rushing in like a torrent, bounding, skipping, laughing, and screaming, till I fancied myself like another Orpheus, about to be torn to pieces by Bacchanals (they are all girls), and I laid down my pen, for they drive all my ideas out of my head. May your shadows never grow less, mes enfans, but I wish you would not make such a cursed row. The author and the author of existence do not amalgamate. That's a fact. Their joyous countenances are answered by a look of despair--their boiling-water heat drives my thermometer down to zero--their confounded merriment gives me a confounded headache--their animal spirits drive me to vegetable spirits--their cup of bliss running over makes me also require a bumper--brandy restores the equilibrium, and I contrive to get rid of them and my headache about one and the same time. Talking about brandy--one morning at two o'clock, about the witching time that ghosts do glide about in churchyards, as I was thinking whether it would not be better to go to bed instead of writing nonsense, in which opinion most of my readers may coincide with me, in stalked three young men who were considerably the worse for potation. There is a great deal of character in inebriety--at the same time that no estimate of character can be made from its effects; for we often find the most quiet men when sober to be the most choleric in their cups--but still there is character, and much that is curious in witnessing its variety of effects. Now these young men were each drunk in a very different war--the first, in a way quite novel; for although he could preserve his equilibrium, and stare immensely, he had lost the power of speech; you saw his lips move, but no articulation or sound succeeded-- the second was laughing drunk; everything that was said, either by himself or by any one else, was magnified into a pun or a _bon mot_--the third, with whom I had no previous acquaintance, was _politely_ drunk. I presume the idea of intruding himself upon a stranger, at such an unseasonable hour, had produced that effect--but let me describe the scene.