“So Ladies!” said I; “the stone which the builders rejected,”—and then looking at my wife's youngest sister—“Oh, it will be such a book!” The manner and the tone were so much in earnest that they arrested the bread and butter on the way to her mouth; and she exclaimed, with her eyes full of wonder and incredulity at the same time, “Why you never can be serious?” “Not serious?” said I; “why I have done nothing but think of it and dream of it the whole night.” “He told me so,” rejoined my Commandante, “the first thing in the morning.” “Ah Stupey!” cried my wife's eldest sister, accompanying the compliment with a protrusion of the head, and an extension of the lips, which disclosed not only the whole remaining row of teeth, but the chasms that had been made in it by the tooth drawer; _hiatus valde lacrymabiles_. “Two volumes,” said I, “and this in the title-page!” So taking out my pencil, I drew upon the back of a letter the mysterious monogram, erudite in its appearance as the digamma of Mr. A. F. Valpy. [Illustration: a tetrahedron] It past from hand to hand. “Why he is not in earnest?” said my wife's youngest sister. “He never can be,” replied my wife. And yet beginning to think that peradventure I was, she looked at me with a quick turn of the eye,—“a pretty subject indeed for you to employ your time upon! You,—_vema whehaha yohu almad otenba twandri athancod!_” I have thought proper to translate this part of my Commandante's speech into the Garamna tongue. CHAPTER III. A. I. THE UTILITY OF POCKETS. A COMPLIMENT PROPERLY RECEIVED. _La tasca è proprio cosa da Christiani._ BENEDETTO VARCHI. My eldest daughter had finished her Latin lessons, and my son had finished his Greek; and I was sitting at my desk, pen in hand, and in mouth at the same time, (a substitute for biting the nails which I recommend to all onygophagists;) when the Bhow Begum came in with her black velvet reticule, suspended as usual from her arm by its silver chain.