I was for a considerable time at another place seated next a most intelligent member of the French bar, whose bad health unfortunately added to a natural taciturnity. He could speak English, and liked to do so. We formed ourselves into a mutual instruction society—I to correct his good English, and he to correct my bad French. But as he preferred English conversation, and I was too lazy to bore him with my French, the educational advantages on my side were reduced to the _minimum visible_. However, we enjoyed to some extent rational conversation on subjects of interest, imparting information to each other, and discussing where we differed. Here was ‘the feast of reason.’ But, though my friend could enjoy all that creates a laugh, ‘the flow of soul’ would not have produced a deluge, or even turned a mill–wheel of moderate dimensions. There is nothing so difficult as to get merry with those who speak another language, into which everything has mentally and slowly to be translated, and the flashes of merriment often will neither brook translation nor abide deliberative meditation. The ball must be kept up. Any efforts in that direction were therefore of a ponderous kind. Sometimes I would, with all due and becoming gravity, put a case to him in French law. ‘If,’ for example, I would say to him; ‘if a Frenchman were to die, leaving an estate as large as this room (a tolerably big one), and twelve children?’ ‘Oh, but,’ he would interpose, smiling, ‘we have no estates so small,’ and perhaps he might have added, ‘No families so large.’ From him I was shifted for a time to the agreeable society of a blooming Swedish lady, who could speak no language but her own, and who was uncommonly ready to imagine others were laughing at her, and accordingly to take offence. In this fix, to make the best of it, I returned to school to remedy the neglects of early life, and being a docile and apparently a reverent pupil, I advanced with such rapid strides to proficiency in the Swedish tongue, that in not many days I learnt that in that hitherto supposed outlandish language _chrystal_ is ‘chrystal’ and _knife_ is ‘knife;’ and had my studies been prolonged, I doubt not that I should in time have come to know that the honest Swedish people do call a spade a spade. This interesting pursuit of knowledge under difficulties was, however, brought to an abrupt close by my being torn away and transferred to the company of an Irish young lady, from whom I speedily elicited that she came from the neighbourhood of Kilkenny. This _was_ irresistible. ‘Have you seen the tails of the two cats?’ ‘Oh, yes’ (with a merry twinkle); ‘they are in the Kilkenny Museum.’ This museum may, like Aladdin’s palace, have been built up in a night; but ere twenty–four hours had elapsed, it was stocked from floor to ceiling with such marvellous rarities as by no possibility had been ever either dreamt of in philosophy, or, what is more, conceived in the fertile brain of the great Barnum.