* * * * * Room-attics. ["Madame PATTI caught cold in a damp artist's room." --_Weekly Paper._] O MOIST, unpleasant artist, you were surely overbold When your rheum--(corrected spelling)--gave our nightingale a cold. When thermometers are falling you'll discover to your cost That a singer who has started damp is bound to be a "frost." * * * * * NOT A GOOD NAME.--It came out in the HARDING-COX divorce suit that "MCNAB" was the Scotch equivalent in hotel visitors' books for "SMITH" or "JONES." It may be equivalent, but it isn't good for "MCNAB"; as where SMITH and JONES might get off, the Scotchman would be "McNabb'd." * * * * * FIRST IMPRESSIONS. (CONTINUED.) [Illustration] Let me collect my scattered senses! Where am I? In Pitti Palace. On narrow staircase. Probably on forbidden ground. I hear footfall-- descending. Perhaps it may be one of the officials, and I shall be caught in the act of attempting to enter the royal attics! What would be the punishment? Death, or penal servitude? The gallows or the galleys? Have happily several one-lira notes in my pocket. If these are not sufficient, five lire, or even ten----But I shall see what sort of man he is. Perhaps a few coppers would be enough. At this moment the obstruction descends, and I discover that he is a fat German tourist. For the first time in my life am pleased to look at a German, though the cut of this one's clothes is even worse than usual. Feel inclined to fall upon his neck and murmur "_Mahlzeit!_" or "_Prosit!_" or some other idiotic exclamation peculiar to his country. Fortunately, remember that these are only said in connection with eating or drinking. Perhaps, if I were to remind him of drink, after he has spent hours in a dry, hot gallery, it would not tend to conciliate him. Therefore muster up the half-dozen words of his awful language which years of anxious study have enabled me to master in all their complexities of gender, number, case, declension, conjugation, agreement, government, &c.--not forgetting the exceptions--and, taking off my hat, ask him if this is the entrance to the galleries. "_Ja wohl_," says he. And moreover if I go up these stairs to the top. "_Ja wohl_," says he again. Emboldened by his courteous affability, I remark that the staircase is very narrow. "_Ja wohl_," says he, for the third time, and passes on. A very interesting conversation with an intelligent foreigner in a country where we are both strangers. There is nothing like travel to enlarge the mind. Besides, one learns so much of foreign languages when one hears the varied idioms and phrases of the natives.