and a venerable elderly man
soliloquising lengthily to himself, and then carrying on a protracted
logomachy with another greybeard--although I understood sundry
colloquial idioms and phrases such as "_uxorem duxit_," "_carum mihi_,"
"_quid agis?_" "_cur amat?_" and the like, all of which I assiduously
translated _viva voce_--I could not succeed in learning the reason why
they were having such a snip-snap, until the interval, when the lady
informed me herself that it was because one of them had carried off a
nautch-girl belonging to the other's son--which caused me to marvel
greatly at her erudition.

I looked that, in the next portion of the performance, I might behold
the nautch-girl, and witness her forcible rescue--or at least some
saltatory exhibition; but, alack! she remained _sotto voce_ and
hermetically sealed; and though other characters, in addition to the
elderly gentlemen, appeared, they were all exclusively masculine in
gender, and there was nothing done but to converse by twos and threes.
When the third portion opened with a long-desiderated peep of
petticoats, I told my neighbour confidently that now at last we were to
see this dancing girl and the abduction; but she replied that it was not
so, for these females were merely the mother of the wife of another of
the youths and her attendant ayah. And even this precious pair, after
weeping and wringing their hands for a while, vanished, not to appear
again.

Now as the entertainment proceeded, I fell into the dumps with
increasing abashment and mortification to see everyone around me, ay,
even the women and the tenderest juveniles! clap the hands and laugh in
their sleeves with merriment at quirks and gleeks in which--in spite of
all my classical proficiency--I could not discover _le mot pour rire_ or
crack so much as the cream of a jest, but must sit there melancholy as a
gib cat or smile at the wrong end of mouth.

For, indeed, I began to fear that I had been fobbed off with the
smattered education of a painted sepulchre, that I should fail so
dolorously to comprehend what was plain as a turnpike-staff to the
veriest British babe and suckling!

However, on observing more closely, I discovered that most of the
grown-up adults present had books containing the translation of all the
witticisms, which they secretly perused, and that the feminality were
also provided with pink leaflets on which the dark outline of the plot
was perspicuously inscribed.

Mo