he proposal was unexpected. I had thought I should have been allowed at
least 3 days to prepare; but it is a bad omen to commence any career
by hesitation, so I just stepped to the professor's desk near which we
stood, and faced the circle of my pupils. I took a moment to collect
my thoughts, and likewise to frame in French the sentence by which I
proposed to open business. I made it as short as possible:--

"Messieurs, prenez vos livres de lecture."

"Anglais ou Francais, monsieur?" demanded a thickset, moon-faced young
Flamand in a blouse. The answer was fortunately easy:--

"Anglais."

I determined to give myself as little trouble as possible in this
lesson; it would not do yet to trust my unpractised tongue with the
delivery of explanations; my accent and idiom would be too open to the
criticisms of the young gentlemen before me, relative to whom I felt
already it would be necessary at once to take up an advantageous
position, and I proceeded to employ means accordingly.

"Commencez!" cried I, when they had all produced their books. The
moon-faced youth (by name Jules Vanderkelkov, as I afterwards learnt)
took the first sentence. The "livre de lecture" was the "Vicar of
Wakefield," much used in foreign schools because it is supposed to
contain prime samples of conversational English; it might, however,
have been a Runic scroll for any resemblance the words, as enunciated by
Jules, bore to the language in ordinary use amongst the natives of Great
Britain. My God! how he did snuffle, snort, and wheeze! All he said was
said in his throat and nose, for it is thus the Flamands speak, but
I heard him to the end of his paragraph without proffering a word of
correction, whereat he looked vastly self-complacent, convinced,
no doubt, that he had acquitted himself like a real born and bred
"Anglais." In the same unmoved silence I listened to a dozen in
rotation, and when the twelfth had concluded with splutter, hiss, and
mumble, I solemnly laid down the book.

"Arretez!" said I. There was a pause, during which I regarded them all
with a steady and somewhat stern gaze; a dog, if stared at hard enough
and long enough, will show symptoms of embarrassment, and so at length
did my bench of Belgians. Perceiving that some of the faces before me
were beginning to look sullen, and others ashamed, I slowly joined my
hands, and ejaculated in a deep "voix de poitrine"--

"Comme c'est affreux!"

They looked at each other, pouted,