uld in Welsh. I succeeded;
how I will not trouble the reader with describing: he and I became great
friends, and he taught me what Welsh he could. In return for his
instructions I persuaded my brother clerks to leave off holloing after
him, and to do nothing further to hurt his feelings, which had been very
deeply wounded, so much so, that after the first two or three lessons he
told me in confidence that on the morning of the very day I first began
to conciliate him he had come to the resolution of doing one of two
things, namely, either to hang himself from the balk of the hayloft, or
to give his master warning, both of which things he told me he should
have been very unwilling to do, more particularly as he had a wife and
family. He gave me lessons on Sunday afternoons, at my father's house,
where he made his appearance very respectably dressed, in a beaver hat,
blue surtout, whitish waistcoat, black trowsers and Wellingtons, all with
a somewhat ancient look--the Wellingtons I remember were slightly pieced
at the sides--but all upon the whole very respectable. I wished at first
to persuade him to give me lessons in the office, but could not succeed:
"No, no, lad;" said he, "catch me going in there: I would just as soon
venture into a nest of porcupines." To translate from books I had
already, to a certain degree, taught myself, and at his first visit I
discovered, and he himself acknowledged, that at book Welsh I was
stronger than himself, but I learnt Welsh pronunciation from him, and to
discourse a little in the Welsh tongue. "Had you much difficulty in
acquiring the sound of the ll?" I think I hear the reader inquire. None
whatever: the double l of the Welsh is by no means the terrible guttural
which English people generally suppose it to be, being in reality a
pretty liquid, exactly resembling in sound the Spanish ll, the sound of
which I had mastered before commencing Welsh, and which is equivalent to
the English lh; so being able to pronounce llano I had of course no
difficulty in pronouncing Lluyd, which by-the-bye was the name of the
groom.

I remember that I found the pronunciation of the Welsh far less difficult
than I had found the grammar, the most remarkable feature of which is the
mutation, under certain circumstances, of particular consonants, when
forming the initials of words. This feature I had observed in the Irish,
which I had then only learnt by ear.

But to return to the groom. He was