It is, my dear, the happy privilege of your sex in England to quit the
dinner-table after the wine-bottles have once or twice gone round it,
and you are thereby saved (though, to be sure, I can't tell what the
ladies do up stairs)--you are saved two or three hours' excessive
dulness, which the men are obliged to go through.

I ask any gentleman who reads this--the letters to my Juliana being
written with an eye to publication--to remember especially how many
times, how many hundred times, how many thousand times, in his hearing,
the battle of Waterloo has been discussed after dinner, and to call to
mind how cruelly he has been bored by the discussion. "Ah, it was lucky
for us that the Prussians came up!" says one little gentleman, looking
particularly wise and ominous. "Hang the Prussians!" (or, perhaps,
something stronger "the Prussians!") says a stout old major on half-pay.
"We beat the French without them, sir, as beaten them we always have!
We were thundering down the hill of Belle Alliance, sir, at the backs
of them, and the French were crying 'Sauve qui peut' long before the
Prussians ever touched them!" And so the battle opens, and for many
mortal hours, amid rounds of claret, rages over and over again.

I thought to myself considering the above things, what a fine thing it
will be in after-days to say that I have been to Brussels and never seen
the field of Waterloo; indeed, that I am such a philosopher as not to
care a fig about the battle--nay, to regret, rather, that when Napoleon
came back, the British Government had not spared their men and left him
alone.

But this pitch of philosophy was unattainable. This morning, after
having seen the Park, the fashionable boulevard, the pictures, the
cafes--having sipped, I say, the sweets of every flower that grows in