It's all very well to talk about "learning French, seeing galleries and studying works of art," my dear Bob, but where's the time?--that's the question. My mother and the girls poach my entire morning. It's the rarest thing in the world for me to get free of them before five o'clock; and then I have just time to dash down to the club, and have a "shy" at the écarté before dinner. Smart play it is, sometimes seventy, ay, a hundred Naps, on a game; and such players too!--fellows that sit for ten minutes with a card on their knee, studying your face, watching every line and lineament of your features, and reading you, by Jove,--reading you like a book. All the false air of ease and indifference, all the brag assurance you may get up to conceal a "bad hand," isn't worth sixpence. They laugh at your puerile efforts, and tell you "you are voled" before you've played a card. We hear so much about genius and talent, and all that kind of thing at home, and you, I have no doubt, are full of the high abilities of some fellowship or medallist man of Trinity; but give _me_ the deep penetration, the intense powers of calculation, the thorough insight into human nature, of some of the fellows I see here; and for success in life, I 'll back them against all your conic section and x plus y geniuses, and all the double first classes that ever breathed. There's a splendid fellow here, a Pole, called Koratinsky; he commanded the cavalry at Ostrolenca, and, it is said, rode down the Russian Guard, and sabred the Imperial Cuirassiers to a man. He's the first écarté and piquet player in Europe, and equal to Deschapelles at whist. Though he is very distant and cold in his manner to strangers, he has been most kind and good-natured to me; has given me some capital advice, too, and warned me against several of the fellows that frequent the club. He tells me that he detests and abhors play, but resorts to it as a distraction. "Que voulez-vous?" said he to me the other day; "when a man who calls himself Ladislaus Koratinsky, who has the blood of three monarchs in his veins, who has twice touched the crown of his native land, sees himself an exile and a 'proscrit,' it is only in the momentary excitement of the gaming-table he can find a passing relief for crushing and withering recollections." He could be in all the highest circles here. The greatest among the nobles are constantly begging and entreating him to come to their houses, but he sternly refuses. "Let me know one family," says he, "one domestic circle, where I can go uninvited, when I will,--where I can repose my confidence, tell my sorrows, and speak of my poor country; give me one such, and I ask for no more; but as for dukes and grand seigneurs, princesses and duchesses, I've had but too much of them." I assure you, Bob, it 's like a page out of some old story of chivalry to listen to him. The splendid sentiments, the glorious conceptions, and