pportunity.

The Lord High Admiral came in, a hale gentleman close upon seventy and
bronzed by the suns and storms of many climes and scarred by the
wounds got in many battles, and I told him how I had seen him sit in a
high-chair and eat fruit and cakes and answer to the name of Johnny. His
granddaughter (the eldest) is but lately married to the youngest of the
Grand Dukes, and so who knows but a day may come when the blood of the
Howellses may reign in the land? I must not forget to say, while I think
of it, that your new false teeth are done, my dear, and your wig. Keep
your head well bundled with a shawl till the latter comes, and so cheat
your persecuting neuralgias and rheumatisms. Would you believe it?--the
Duchess of Cambridge is deafer than you--deafer than her husband. They
call her to breakfast with a salvo of artillery; and usually when it
thunders she looks up expectantly and says, "Come in." But she has
become subdued and gentle with age and never destroys the furniture now,
except when uncommonly vexed. God knows, my dear, it would be a happy
thing if you and old Lady Harmony would imitate this spirit. But indeed
the older you grow the less secure becomes the furniture. When I throw
chairs through the window I have sufficient reason to back it. But
you--you are but a creature of passion.

The monument to the author of 'Gloverson and His Silent Partners' is
finished.--[Ralph Keeler. See chap. lxxxiii.]--It is the stateliest and
the costliest ever erected to the memory of any man. This noble classic
has now been translated into all the languages of the earth and is
adored by all nations and known to all creatures. Yet I have
conversed as familiarly with the author of it as I do with my own
great-grandchildren.

I wish you could see old Cambridge and Ponkapog. I love them as dearly
as ever, but privately, my dear, they are not much improvement on
idiots. It is melancholy to hear them jabber over the same pointless
anecdotes three and four times of an evening, forgetting that they had
jabbered them over three or four times the evening before. Ponkapog
still writes poetry, but the old-time fire has mostly gone out of it.
Perhaps his best effort of late years is this:

O soul, soul, soul of mine!
Soul, soul, soul of throe!
Thy soul, my soul, two souls entwine,
And sing thy lauds in crystal wine!

This he goes about repeating to everybody, daily and nightly, inso