--I speak at last."

"Hear, hear!" said my mother, humouring the joke.

"The next thing he will break, mamma," whispered Sarah, "will be the
back of the best arm-chair."

"I go back into my life, and I address myself to the noblest of created
beings," continued Pesca, vehemently apostrophising my unworthy self
over the top rail of the chair. "Who found me dead at the bottom of
the sea (through Cramp); and who pulled me up to the top; and what did
I say when I got into my own life and my own clothes again?"

"Much more than was at all necessary," I answered as doggedly as
possible; for the least encouragement in connection with this subject
invariably let loose the Professor's emotions in a flood of tears.

"I said," persisted Pesca, "that my life belonged to my dear friend,
Walter, for the rest of my days--and so it does. I said that I should
never be happy again till I had found the opportunity of doing a good
Something for Walter--and I have never been contented with myself till
this most blessed day. Now," cried the enthusiastic little man at the
top of his voice, "the overflowing happiness bursts out of me at every
pore of my skin, like a perspiration; for on my faith, and soul, and
honour, the something is done at last, and the only word to say now
is--Right-all-right!"

It may be necessary to explain here that Pesca prided himself on being
a perfect Englishman in his language, as well as in his dress, manners,
and amusements. Having picked up a few of our most familiar colloquial
expressions, he scattered them about over his conversation whenever
they happened to occur to him, turning them, in his high relish for
their sound and his general ignorance of their sense, into compound
words and repetitions of his own, and always running them into each
other, as if they consisted of one long syllable.

"Among the fine London Houses where I teach the language of my native
country," said the Professor, rushing into his long-deferred
explanation without another word of preface, "there is one, mighty
fine, in the big place called Portland. You all know where that is?
Yes, yes--course-of-course. The fine house, my good dears, has got
inside it a fine family. A Mamma, fair and fat; three young Misses,
fair and fat; two young Misters, fair and fat; and a Papa, the fairest
and the fattest of all, who is a mighty merchant, up to his eyes in
gold--a fine man once, but seeing that he has got a naked head and two
chi