wholly forgotten, dead almost as our Latin is dead. She and I always speak French together when we meet, because it is easier for her than English, and a more natural expression. I have known some other cases of displacement of the native tongue, and have lately had the opportunity of watching a case of such displacement during its progress. A sergeant in the Italian army deserted to join Garibaldi in the campaign of 1870. On the conclusion of peace it was impossible for him to return to Italy, so he settled in France and married there. I found some work for him, and for some months saw him frequently. Up to the date of his marriage he spoke no language but Italian, which he could read and write correctly, but after his marriage the process of displacement of the native tongue began immediately by the corruption of it. He did not keep his Italian safely by itself, putting the French in a place of its own as he gradually acquired it, but he mixed the two inextricably together. Imagine the case of a man who, having a bottle half full of wine, gets some beer given him and pours it immediately into the wine-bottle. The beer will never be pure beer, but it will effectually spoil the wine. This process is not so much one of displacement as of corruption, it takes place readily in uncultivated minds, with feeble separating powers. Another example of this was a Neapolitan servant of an English gentleman, who mixed his Italian twice, first with French and afterwards with English, producing a compound intelligible to nobody but himself, if indeed he himself understood it. At the time I knew him, the man had no means of communication with his species. When his master told him to do anything, he made a guess at what was likely to be for the moment his master's most probable want, and sometimes hit the mark, but more generally missed it. The man's name was Alberino, and I remember on one occasion profiting by a mistaken guess of his. After a visit to Alberino's master, my servant brought forth a magnificent basket of trout, which surprised me, as nothing had been said about them. However, we ate them, and only discovered afterwards that the present was due to an illusion of Alberino's. His master had never told him to give me the trout, but he had interpreted some other order in that sense. When you asked him for mustard, he would first touch the salt, and then the pepper, etc., looking at you inquiringly till you nodded assent. Any attempt at conversation with Alberino was sure to lead to a perfect comedy of misunderstandings. He never had the remotest idea of what his interlocutor was talking about; but he pretended to catch your meaning, and answered at haphazard. He had a habit of talking aloud to himself, "but in a tongue no man could understand."