t "continual cursing"
for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay
stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done.

However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves,
by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair
condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed,
had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian;
my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained
any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular
affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took
the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great
Russell Street, close to the British Museum.

We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at
this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but
his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too
much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his
return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much
involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those
days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it
is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built
up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work,
and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time
almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender
sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a
report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded),
that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had never had children.
"Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself have experienced, and
many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to
come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with
long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune." He was doubtless thinking
of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in
Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born.

A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood
Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for
the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:

"When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three clerks
seemed to be taking account of stock, a b