direct from Satan’s kitchen, I place no confidence in it at all, as Black Jack had nothing of Satan about him but blackness, on which account he was called Black Jack.  Nor am I disposed to give credit to a report that his hatred of the Portuguese arose from some ill treatment which he had once experienced when on shore, at Lisbon, from certain gentlewomen of the place, but rather conclude that it arose from an opinion he entertained that the Portuguese never paid their debts, one of the ambassadors of that nation, whose house he had served, having left Paris several thousand francs in his debt.  This is all that I have to say about Black Jack, without whose funny jokes and good ordinary I should have passed my time in Paris in a very disconsolate manner.

’After we had been at Paris between two and three months, we left it in the direction of Italy, which country the family had a great desire to see.  After travelling a great many days in a thing which, though called a diligence, did not exhibit much diligence, we came to a great big town, seated around a nasty salt-water bason, connected by a narrow passage with the sea.  Here we were to embark; and so we did as soon as possible, glad enough to get away—­at least I was, and so I make no doubt were the rest, for such a place for bad smells I never was in.  It seems all the drains and sewers of the place run into that same salt bason, voiding into it all their impurities, which, not being able to escape into the sea in any considerable quantity, owing to the narrowness of the entrance, there accumulate, filling the whole atmosphere with these same outrageous scents, on which account the town is a famous lodging-house of the plague.  The ship in which we embarked was bound for a place in Italy called Naples, where we were to stay some time.  The voyage was rather a lazy one, the ship not being moved by steam; for at the time of which I am speaking, some five years ago, steam-ships were not so plentiful as now.  There were only two passengers in the grand cabin, where my governor and his daughters were, an Italian lady and a priest.  Of the lady I have not much to say; she appeared to be a quiet respectable person enough, and after our arrival at Naples I neither saw nor heard anything more of her; but of the priest I shall have a good deal to say in the sequel (that, by the bye, is a word I learnt from the professor of rhetoric), and it would have been well for our family had they never met him.

’On the third day of the voyage the priest came to me, who was rather unwell with sea-sickness, which he, of course, felt nothing of—­that kind of people being never affected like others.  He was a finish-looking man of about forty-five, but had something strange in his eyes, which I have since thought denoted that all was not right in a certain place called the heart.  After a few words of condolence, in a broken kind of English, he asked me various questions about our family; and I, won by