Foreign languages ought to be begun in nurseries, and not left for schools: all good linguists have begun by learning words in different languages as soon as they could speak. If children are only told that a certain creature is a cat, they will afterwards learn the word ‘chat’ as a translation of the word ‘cat.’ But if they are told that the creature is called ‘cat’ by some people and ‘chat’ by others, they are prepared to find that other people call it ‘katze,’ others ‘gatto,’ and so on. And they connect the creature with its foreign names at once, instead of indirectly through the English name.--However, these nursery lessons are not always a success. I remember a Parisian who learnt her English from an Irish nurse, and always spoke it with a brogue. Good linguists sometimes get confused, when languages have words with similar sounds but different meanings. Thus, the German ‘nehmen’ sounds like the English ‘name’ and ‘dumm’ like ‘dumb’ and ‘bekommen’ like ‘become.’ A man once said to me at breakfast, “I shall name bacon”: then, seeing that I did not grasp what he had said, he hurriedly corrected it, “Ach, I am dumb. I shall become bacon.” When I first went to Greece, they still spelled Byron’s name phonetically, Mpairon. They pronounce _b_ like our _v_, but _mp_ like our _b_--a fact unknown to many of the people who talk about the Mpret of Albania. Similarly, the Spaniards spelled O’Donohue’s name O’Donojo. He was Cuesta’s chief-of-staff in the Peninsula. The veterans of that war picked up the foreign names by hearsay, and usually got them right; but now our veterans can read, they see how foreign names are spelled and mispronounce them sadly. Leekatoo suggests a cockatoo, but really is Le Câteau. There is always a temptation to turn foreign names into some English words with which we are familiar: we still say Leg-horn for Livorno, though we have dropped Lush-bone for Lisboa, and call it Lisbon now. I was looking for a ship at Devonport, the Hecate, and thought I spotted her; so I asked, “Is that the Hekaty?” and was answered, “She’s the He Cat.” In the gardens here the Gloire de Lorraine begonia is always called the Lower End. I hear people talk of the Cornice as the Cornish road, and make Hague rhyme with ague. After the Kruger telegram _Punch_ printed an imaginary letter to the German Emperor (18 January 1896) signed Grandmamma, but attributed on internal evidence to the Duke of York, there being a nautical breeziness about it, e.g. “Solche eine confounded Impertinenz habe ich nie gesehen.” I saw this in Vienna, reprinted in the February number of _Progress_, the editor stating explicitly that it was “drollig.” In the ensuing War people on the Continent felt certain that our troops were using Dum-Dum bullets; and I saw a newspaper at Paris which said that we were slaughtering the Boers with our murderous Dam-Dams. And in 1912 or 1913 I saw one there which said that we expressed our highest hopes in singing “God shave the King.”