tabulated columns, with special N.B.'s to use the infinitive in
talking to the gondolier.

Finding the hours of time rather puzzling as recorded in the "Study
of Italian Made Easy," I devoted twenty-four hours to learning how
to say the time from one o'clock at noon to midnight, or thirteen
to twenty-three o'clock. My soul revolted at the task, for a
foreign tongue abounds in these malicious little refinements of
speech, invented, I suppose, to prevent strangers from making too
free with it on short acquaintance. I found later on that my
labour had been useless, and that evidently the Italians themselves
have no longer the leisure for these little eccentricities of
language and suffer them to pass from common use. If the Latin
races would only meet in convention and agree to bestow the
comfortable neuter gender on inanimate objects and commodities, how
popular they might make themselves with the English-speaking
nations; but having begun to "enrich" their language, and make it
more "subtle" by these perplexities, centuries ago, they will no
doubt continue them until the end of time.

If one has been a devoted patron of the opera or student of music,
one has an Italian vocabulary to begin with. This, if accompanied
by the proper gestures (for it is vain to speak without liberal
movements, of the hands, shoulders, and eyebrows), this, I
maintain, will deceive all the English-speaking persons who may be
seated near your table in a foreign cafe.

The very first evening after our arrival, Jack Copley asked
Salemina and me to dine with him at the best restaurant in Venice.
Jack Copley is a well of nonsense undefiled, and he, like