rockets, and other pyrotechnical fodder which I had brought in my pocket for your flock. I gulped it all down, however, with a pretty good grace, and went to my dinner like a philosopher. Do you not remember that I was particularly brilliant upon that occasion, and that I told my best story only three times in the course of the evening? I flatter myself that I know how to conceal my feelings,--although I punished your claret cruelly, and was sick after it. I have a notion, dear Don, that I am not writing very coherently, as you, whether _pransus_ or _impransus_, almost always do. Under agitating circumstances you are cool, and I verily think that you would have reported the earthquake at Lisbon without missing one squashed _hidalgo_, one drop of the blue blood spilt, one convent unroofed, or one convent belle damaged. Your report would have been minutely circumstantial enough to have found favor with Samuel Johnson, LL.D., who for so long a time refused to believe in the Portuguese convulsion. But we are not all fit by nature to put about butter-tubs in July. I plead guilty to an excitable temperament. The Bowery youth here speak of a kind of perspiration which, metaphorically, they designate as "a cast-iron sweat." This for the last twelve hours has been my own agonizing style of exudation. And, moreover, the startling event of which I am to write has (to borrow again from the sage Montaigne) created in me "so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another, without design or order, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing, hoping in time to make them ashamed of themselves." The novelty of my position causes me to shamble and shuffle, now to pause painfully, and then to dance like a droll. I go out from the presence of my household, that I may vent myself by private absurdities and exclusive antics, I retire into remote corners, that I may grin fearfully, unseen of Mistress Gamp and my small servant. I am possessed by a shouting devil, who is continually prompting me to give the "hip-hip-hurrah!" under circumstances which might split apex and base of several of my most important arteries,--which might bring on apoplexy, epilepsy, suffusion of the brain, or hernia,--which might cause death,--yes, Sir,--death of the mother, father, and child.