the while.  He had the look, to general perception, of a man but half-escaped:  and as when the notes of things taken by the vision in front are being set down upon tablets in the head behind.  Victor observed his look at Nataly.  The look was like a door aswing, revealing in concealing.  She was not or did not appear struck by it; perhaps, if observant, she took it for a busy professional gentleman’s holiday reckoning of the hours before the return train to his harness, and his arrangements for catching it.  She was, as she could be on a day of trial, her enchanting majestic self again—­defying suspicions.  She was his true mate for breasting a world honoured in uplifting her.

Her singing of a duet with Nesta, called forth Dr. Themison’s very warm applause.  He named the greatest of contraltos.  Colney did better service than Fenellan at the luncheon-table:  he diverted Nataly and captured Dr. Themison’s ear with the narrative of his momentous expedition of European Emissaries, to plead the cause of their several languages at the Court of Japan:  a Satiric Serial tale, that hit incidentally the follies of the countries of Europe, and intentionally, one had to think, those of Old England.  Nesta set him going.  Just when he was about to begin, she made her father laugh by crying out in a rapture, ‘Oh!  Delphica!’ For she was naughtily aware of Dudley Sowerby’s distaste for the story and disgust with the damsel Delphica.

Nesta gave Dr. Themison the preliminary sketch of the grand object of the expedition:  indeed one of the eminent ones of the world; matter for an Epic; though it is to be feared, that our part in it will not encourage a Cis-Atlantic bard.  To America the honours from beginning to end belong.

So, then, Japan has decided to renounce its language, for the adoption of the language it may choose among the foremost famous European tongues.  Japan becomes the word for miraculous transformations of a whole people at the stroke of a wand; and let our English enrol it as the most precious of the powerful verbs.  An envoy visits the principal Seats of Learning in Europe.  He is of a gravity to match that of his unexampled and all but stupefying mission.  A fluent linguist, yet an Englishman, the slight American accent contracted during a lengthened residence in the United States is no bar to the patriotism urging him to pay his visit of exposition and invitation from the Japanese Court to the distinguished Doctor of Divinity Dr. Bouthoin.  The renown of Dr. Bouthoin among the learned of Japan has caused the special invitation to him; a scholar endowed by an ample knowledge and persuasive eloquence to cite and instance as well as illustrate the superior advantages to Japan and civilization in the filial embrace of mother English.  ’For to this it must come predestinated,’ says the astonishing applicant.  ’We seem to see a fitness in it,’ says the cogitative Rev. Doctor.  ’And an Island England in those waters, will do wonders for Commerce,’ adds the former.  ’We think of things more pregnant,’ concludes the latter, with a dry gleam of ecclesiastical knowingness.  And let the Editor of the Review upon his recent pamphlet, and let the prelate reprimanding him, and let the newspapers criticizing his pure Saxon, have a care!