Frenchmen in conversation without innocent enjoyment. The sounds they make are marvellous, but it is beyond question that they mean something, and it is pleasant to know that persons who cannot speak English are not left without means of communication. Foreigners, an Englishman remembers, labour under hopeless disabilities. Little can be expected from a people whose language permits a sentence—in a scientific book too—to end with “zu, ab,” and one may not be Pharisaic and yet have gloomy views—this illustration can be used in the pulpit—about a nation that has no word for home. One of our French class at school, a stout gentleman now, and worth £100,000, declares he would never demean himself by any attempt at foreign tongues, and demands that foreigners should learn English, “which will yet be the language of the world.” He was recently boasting that he had travelled a month by the aid of signs, although he does himself less than justice, for on sight of the railway station he will say “Bannhof, eh?” to the driver in quite a jocular way, as one by way of pleasing a four-footed pet. 

 Tittups, on the other hand, who reached the confines of the future tense with Moossy, and who affects culture, is understood to have an easy acquaintance with at least three Continental tongues in their more literary forms—colloquialisms he firmly refuses—and is worth hearing in a Florentine shop. “Avete voi” (Tittups is a little man, with a single eyeglass, and a voice three sizes too large for him); “ah... what you call... ah, papier und... ah, ein, that is eine Feder,” goes through a panto-mine of writing, and finally obtains what he wants by pointing it out with his stick. He is fond of enlarging on the advantage of reading Italian, and insists that no translation has ever conveyed the grander ideas of Dante, although Tittups admits that the ancient Italian tries him. “Have to work at it, you know; but the modern, a boy who knows his grammar can manage it. Seen the Giomate di Roma to-day?” Italians have a keener insight into character than any people in Europe, and one could almost pardon the attendant in the Mediterranean sleeper who insisted that Tittups must be a native-born Tuscan from the way he said “baga-glia.”  

 “Gli,” Tittups mentioned casually to a friend, is a test in Italian pronunciation, and he presented the discerning critic with a five-franc piece at Calais. 

 But why should the average man laugh at Tittups, as if he had never had experiences? Has he never been asked by his companion, to whom he has been an oracle on German literature, to translate some utterly absurd and unnecessary piece of 

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