Bedad! here's a leader, ye sons o' Killarney Begorrah! ye'll not find a better I'll lay. Thin hould all yer braggin' and blusterin' blarney, And take a few hints from the Mimber for Bray!
BRITANNIA (_to Italia_). "HEARTILY I WISH YOU WELL! BE 'LESS VISIONARY,' AND 'MORE PRACTICAL'!"
["The financial condition of Italy in the last degree unsatisfactory and unsound, the Roman question ever looming in the horizon, and the certainty of internal dissension continuing to develop, must necessarily blast all fair prospects for peace and prosperity in the young nation, towards which England has been inclined to look with sympathetic regard and almost maternal anxiety."--_Vide Daily Telegraph, Sept. 16, "The Ransom of Rome."_
"An enormous debt has been run up, and the financial position of Italy has been damaged by the magnificent aims of her rulers."--_Times, Sept. 21._]
DEAR MISTER,--After to have assisted at the Congress of Geographs at London I come of to make a little _voyage d'agrément_--a voyage of agreement--to the Island of Wight. I am gone to render visit to one of my english friends who inhabits Sandown. I go not to tell you his name, that would be to outrage the privacy of your "Home, sweet home." I shall call him "SMITH." _Ah, le brave garçon?_--the brave boy! Eh well, this good SMITH he invites me at him--_chez lui_, how say you?--and I part from London by a beautiful morning of August, and I arrive to Portsmout. See there the Island of Wight in face! I traverse the sea in packet-boat, I arrive to Ride, and, in fine, to Sandown. _Tiens_, see there the brave SMITH on the quay of the station! I would wish to embrace him. But no! We are in England. I go to give him a shake-hands. _Voilà tout._ And he conducts me to his house, and I see there Madame, who is charming, and his childs. Ah, the dear little childs. But I speak not of them, because all that is the "Home, sweet home," and, as one says in english, the castle of the Englishman is in his house.
Sandown is a little town, enough coquette, very well placed at the border of the sea. In effect, there is a _plage_, a _promenade_, a _jetée_. It is not precisely the _plage_ of Trouville, the _promenade_ of Ostende; but it is enough agreeable. Only, at place of the pretty little cabins, the tents, so charming, so coquette, there is some drolls of things, some boxes on wheels, which one calls "bathings machines." Oh, _la, la!_ I mock myself of them. And of more! The ladys and the gentlemans can not to bathe themselves together. They are there, all near the one of the other, but not together. _Ah çà, c'est épatant!_ Me I march all gaily in the water towards the ladys; I am in my costume of bath, all that there is of most as he must--_de plus comme il faut_, how say you? When a man in a little boat agitates the arms, and cries himself, "Hi there!" that is to say, "_Hé là-bas!_"--and still of more which I comprehend not. And my friend SMITH he cries to me also, and he agitates the arms, and, in fine, I comprehend that it is defended. What droll of idea!