It is no more disgrace for a foreigner not to tell the truth than to own that he does not sing, nor dance the mazurka; not so much, indeed, because these are marks of a polite education. And yet it is to hold conversation with these people we pore over dictionaries, and Ollendorfs, and Hamiltonian gospels. As for the enlargement and expansion of the intelligence that comes of acquiring languages, there never was a greater fallacy. Look abroad upon your acquaintances: who are the glib linguists, who are the faultless in French genders, and the immaculate in German declensions? the flippant boarding-school miss, or the brainless, unpaid attaché, that cannot, compose a note in his own language. Who are the bungling conversera that make drawing-rooms blush and dinner-tables titter? Your first-rate debater in the Commons, your leader at the bar, your double first, or your great electro-magnetic fellow that knows the secret laws of water-spouts and whirlpools, and can make thunder and lightning just to amuse himself. Take my word for it, your linguist is as poor a creature as a dancing-master, and just as great a formalist. If you ask me, then, why I devote myself to such unrewarding labor, I answer, "It is true I know it to be so, but my apology is, that I make no progress." No, Tom, I never advance a step. I can neither conjugate nor decline, and the auxiliary verbs will never aid me in anything. So far as my lingual incapacity goes, I might be one of the great geniuses of the age; and very probably I am, too, without knowing it! I have little to tell you of the place itself. It is a quaint old town on the side of the lake; the most remarkable object being the minster, or cathedral. They show you the spot in the aisle where old Huss stood to receive his sentence of death. Even after a lapse of centuries, there was something affecting to stand where a man once stood to bear that he was to be burned alive. Of course I have little sympathy with a heretic, but still I venerate the martyr, the more since I am strongly disposed to think that it is one of those characters which are not the peculiar product of an age of railroads and submarine telegraphs. The expansion of the intelligence, Tom, seems to be in the inverse ratio of the expansion of the conscience, and the stubborn old spirit of right that was once the mode, would nowadays be construed into a dogged, stupid bull-headedness, unworthy of the enlightenment of our glorious era. Take my word for it, there's a great many eloquent and indignant letter-writers in the newspapers would shrink from old Huss's test for their opinions, and a fossil elk is not a greater curiosity than would be a man ready to stake life on his belief. When a fellow tells you of "dying on the floor of the House," he simply means that he'll talk till there's a "count out;" and as for "registering vows in heaven," and "wasting out existence in the gloom of a dungeon," it's just balderdash, and nothing else.