of the "Times,"
I met with one which promised novelty, at least; I had had too much
experience in such matters to anticipate from it any very great
_pecuniary_ compensation. The said advertisement was to the effect,
that a gentleman who combined literary tastes with business habits was
required to edit a paper published in a town in South Wales; and it went
on to state, that application, personally or by letter, might be made to
the proprietor of the said journal at M----.

That I possessed some taste for literature I was well enough assured;
but as for my "business habits," perhaps the least said about them, the
better. This condition of candidateship, however, I quietly shirked,
while counting over my few remaining coins, scarcely more than
sufficient, after paying my landlady, to defray my expenses to M----,
some one hundred and sixty miles distant. Determining, then, to assume a
commercial virtue, though I had it not, I quitted the metropolis, and in
due time reached the land of leeks, with a light heart, and seven and
sixpence sterling in my pocket.

A queer little Welsh town was M----, with an androgynous population,--or
so it seemed to me, who had never before beheld women wearing men's hats
and coats, and men with head-coverings and other articles of apparel
of a very ambiguous description. It chanced to be market-day when I
arrived, so that I had a capital opportunity of observing the population
for whose edification my "literary tastes" were, I hoped, to be called
into requisition. But at the very outset a tremendous difficulty stared
me in the face. Nine out of every ten of the people I met or passed
spoke in a language that to me was as unintelligibly mysterious as the
cuneiform characters on Mr. Layard's Nineveh sculptures. It was a hard,
harsh, guttural dialect, which even those who were to the manner born
seemed to jerk out painfully and spasmodically from their lingual
organs. This was especially obvious during a bargain, where an excited
market-man was endeavoring to pass off a tough old gander as a tender
young goose, to some equally excited customer. It was dissonant enough
to _my_ ear, but I fancy it would have driven a sensitive Italian to
distraction. After listening to the horrible jargon for some time, I
could easily believe the story which poor William Maginn used to tell
with such unction, of the origin of the Welsh language. It was to this
effect.--When the Tower of Babel was being built, th