We have two job coaches, for we are too many for one, and a boat hired by the week, with a considerable retinue of mountain ponies and donkeys, guides, goats, whey-sellers, and geological specimen-folk without end. If Mrs. G. was only fashionable, we could n't be more than ruined; but she is learned and literary, and given to the "ologies," Tom, and that's what I fear will drive us clean mad. She has an eternal restlessness in her to be at something; one day, it's the date of a medal; the next, it is the family connections of a "moss," or the chemistry of a meteoric stone; and, shall I own to you, my dear friend, that I don't believe she either understands or cares one jot about them all? There 's a big herbarium bound in green, and a grand book of autographs in blue and gold, on the drawing-room table; there's a bit of "gneiss," a big beetle, and a fossil frog on the chimney-piece; but my name isn't Kenny Dodd if she has n't more sympathies with modern dandies than antediluvian monsters. That's my private opinion;» and, of course, I mention it in confidence. You 'll say, "What matter is that to you?" and, true enough, it is not, as regards her; but what will become of us, if Mrs. D. takes a turn for entomology or comparative anatomy, and worse, maybe? She's just the kind of woman to do it. She'd learn the tight-rope if she thought it was fashionable, or, as the newspapers say, "patronized by the aristocracy." Now, Tom, you can fancy the unknown sea upon which we have embarked. For, however unadapted we may be to fashionable life, one thing is quite clear,--we never were made for the abstract sciences; and it strikes me forcibly that the great lesson of Continental life is that everybody can do everything. I am not going to say that it is not a pleasant and a very flattering theory, but is it quite safe, Tom? That's the question. The highest step I ever attained in chemistry was how to concoct a tumbler of punch; and my knowledge of botany does not go far beyond distinguishing "greens" from geraniums; and it's not at my time of life that I'm to drive myself crazy with hard names and classifications; and if I know anything of Mrs. D., her intellectual faculties have attained all the vigor that nature meant for them many a year ago.