to my dinner like a philosopher. Do you not
remember that I was particularly brilliant upon that occasion, and that
I told my best story only three times in the course of the evening?
I flatter myself that I know how to conceal my feelings,--although
I punished your claret cruelly, and was sick after it.

I have a notion, dear Don, that I am not writing very coherently,
as you, whether _pransus_ or _impransus_, almost always do. Under
agitating circumstances you are cool, and I verily think that you
would have reported the earthquake at Lisbon without missing one
squashed _hidalgo_, one drop of the blue blood spilt, one convent
unroofed, or one convent belle damaged. Your report would have been
minutely circumstantial enough to have found favor with Samuel Johnson,
LL.D., who for so long a time refused to believe in the Portuguese
convulsion. But we are not all fit by nature to put about butter-tubs
in July. I plead guilty to an excitable temperament. The Bowery youth
here speak of a kind of perspiration which, metaphorically, they
designate as "a cast-iron sweat." This for the last twelve hours has been
my own agonizing style of exudation. And, moreover, the startling event
of which I am to write has (to borrow again from the sage Montaigne)
created in me "so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one upon another,
without design or order, that, the better at leisure to contemplate their
strangeness and absurdity, I have begun to commit them to writing,
hoping in time to make them ashamed of themselves." The novelty of
my position causes me to shamble and shuffle, now to pause painfully,
and then to dance like a droll. I go out from the presence of my
household, that I may vent myself by private absurdities and
exclusive antics, I retire into remote corners, that I may grin
fearfully, unseen of Mistress Gamp and my small servant. I am
possessed by a shouting devil, who is continually prompting me to
give the "hip-hip-hurrah!" under circumstances which might split
apex and base of several of my most important arteries,--which
might bring on apoplexy, epilepsy, suffusion of the brain, or
hernia,--which might cause death,--yes, Sir,--death of the mother,
father, and child.

--Really, good friends, I ask your pardon! I do not know what I have
done. Did I collar you, Dr. Slop? Send in your bill tomorrow! Did I
smash the instruments beyond repair? And should you say now,--just
speaking off-hand,--that two hundred and fifty