So that it would appear, that when we meet an acquaintance in the street, and accost him with "How do you do this morning?" and he replies "pretty well, I thank you," we are probably speaking half a dozen languages at once. What "learned Thebans" we must be! In this way a man who has a tolerable understanding of _Dilworth's spelling book_ must be no inconsiderable linguist while one, who can read _Johnson at sight_, must be a perfect _Polyglot_. The poor Burgeois gentilhomme was quite amazed to find, that he had been speaking _prose_ all his life without knowing it; and we are no less astonished on discovering that we had been talking _Russian_, _Egyptian_, _Persian_, _Cimbrian_, _Teutonic_, and _Chinese_, for years, without having ever dreamed of it. There have been great controversies among the learned as to what was that formidable dialect, which arose at Babel, out of the confusion of tongues, but after this discovery we can have no doubt that it is that very English which we all speak, and instead of High Dutch, which some have supposed was the language used by Adam in Paradise, we do now verily believe, that it was that _pure English_, of which so few traces have been left!--_Lou. Adv._ "_A Stitch in time, saves nine._"--A celebrated French writer on political economy, M Say, has this story:--'Being in the country, I had an example of one of those small losses which a family is exposed to through negligence. For the want of a latchet of small value, the wicket of a barn yard looking to the fields, was often left open; every one who went through, drew the door to; but having no means to fasten it, it remained flapping: the poultry escaped, and were lost. One day a fine pig got out and ran into the woods. Immediately all the world was after it; the gardener, the cook, the dairy-maid, all run to recover the swine. The gardener got sight of him first,--and jumping over the ditch to stop him, he sprained his ancle, and was confined a fortnight to the house.--The cook, on her return, found all the linen she had left to dry by the fire, burned; and the dairy-maid having run off before she had tied up the cows, one of them broke the leg of a colt in the stable. The gardener's lost time was worth twenty crowns, valuing the pain at nothing; the linen burned, and the colt spoiled, were worth as much more. Here a loss of forty crowns and much pain, trouble, vexation, and inconvenience, for want of a latch, which would not cost three pence, and all through careless neglect.' _Rats._--The following curious mode of catching rats is extracted from the works of Muller, an apothecary of Weringerode, in Germany:--