"There's a question!" shouted Everybody, indignantly. "Have five great nations sent clowns to represent them?" "I will soon see about that," said MR. PUNCH. "When the good PANTAGRUEL was asked to decide a most tangled, knotty, and vast law-suit, over which a hundred lawyers had wrangled and fattened for years, what was his first order? Nay, answer me not in words, but let me take my cooling draught, and see whether you know RABELAIS." As with one impulse all sprang up, delight in each face. Secretaries and porters were summoned, and every scrap of paper, from the smallest Note to the most gigantic Case was removed into the court-yard. In five minutes all the painted glass in the windows was richly illuminated, and the flames roared like Vesuvius. "In these circumstances," said MR. PUNCH, "and as thinking of the 'frozen Caucasus' will not enable one to bear roasting, M. the Count, you might order me some ice." "Icebergs to MR. PUNCH till further notice," said the magnificent Italian, in a style worthy of COSMO himself. "You _have_ studied RABELAIS," said MR. PUNCH, when the fire had subsided, "and I am sure that you will continue to be guided by his wisdom. Do you accept my sentence, in this Anglo-American business, as final. No 'understandings,' mind. Swear it, with good mouth-filling oaths." They all sent out fervent voices, but MR. DAVIS (who has had the advantage of knowing MR. GREELEY) discharged a kuss so terrific that it tore all the other sounds to tatters. "Hear, and record the oath, immoral Gods!" exclaimed MR. PUNCH, in a manner like that of JOHN KEMBLE, only superior in impressiveness. "And now I shall give you a judgment like that of the good PANTAGRUEL. Stenographers!" Then said PANTAGRUEL-PUNCH, "and the pauses amid his speech were more awful than the sound:" "=Not= having read one word of the cackle just combusted, and knowing and caring nothing about the matter in question, I hereby give sentence that England shall pay to America, on the first of April last, nineteen thousand bottles of hay with a needle in each. Shall, on the very first Sunday in the middle of the week, further pay to America eleven millions of pigs in pokes; and finally, and without fail, Shall, in the next Greek Kalends, remit to Washington two billions of bottles of smoke, and one thousand casks of the best pickled Australian moonshine, deodorised and aërated.