ever to be forgotten,
when I received my appointment as something in the antipodes, and we
went up to town to thank the great man who bestowed it, and he asked
us to dinner, and he was, I fancied, more than polite to my wife, and I
sulked about it when we got home, and she petted and caressed me, and
we were better friends than ever, and I swore I would not accept the
Minister's bounty, and we set off back again to our cottage in Wales,
and there we were when I came to myself once more.

It is always pleasant--at least, I have ever felt it so, on awaking from
a dream or a revery--to know that one has borne himself well in some
imaginary crisis of difficulty and peril. I like to think that I was in
no hurry to get into the longboat. I am glad I gave poor Dick that last
fifty-pound note,--my last in the world,--and I rejoice to remember that
I did not run away from that grizzly bear, but sent the four-pound ball
right into the very middle of his forehead. You feel in all these that
the metal of your nature has been tested, and come out pure gold; at all
events, _I_ did, and was very happy thereat. It was not till after some
little time that I could get myself clear out of dreamland, and back to
the actual world of small debts and difficulties, and then I bethought
me of the newspaper which lay unread beside me.

I began it now, resolved to examine it from end to end, till I
discovered the passage that alluded to me. It was so far pleasant
reading, that it was novel and original. A very able leader set forth
that nothing could equal the blessings of the Pope's rule at Rome,--no
people were so happy, so prosperous, or so contented,--that all the
granaries were full, and all the jails empty, and the only persons of
small incomes in the state were the cardinals, and that they were too
heavenly-minded to care for it. After this, there came some touching
anecdotes of that good man the late King of Naples. And then there was
a letter from Frohsdorf, with fifteen francs enclosed to the inhabitants
of a village submerged by an inundation. There were pleasant little
paragraphs, too, about England, and all the money she was spending to
propagate infidelity and spread the slave-trade,--the two great and
especial objects of her policy,--after which came insults to France and
injustice to Ireland. The general tone of the print was war with every
one but some twenty or thirty old ladies and gentlemen living in exile
somewhere in Bohemi