SPEECHIFYING. 
65 
a lazy wonder they should always he full, though I 
did nothing hut empty them,—and at last solved 
the phenomenon hy concluding I had become a 
kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sen¬ 
tence, had been reversed : then suddenly I felt as if 
I were disembodied,—a distant spectator of my own 
performances, and of the feast at which my person 
remained seated. The voices of my host, of the Rector, 
of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they 
reached me through a whispering tube ; and when I rose 
to speak, it was as to an audience in another sphere, 
and in a language of another state of being: yet, how¬ 
ever unintelligible to myself, I must have been in some 
sort understood, for at the end of each sentence, cheers, 
faint as the roar of waters on a far-off strand, floated 
towards me; and if I am to believe a report of the 
proceedings subsequently shown us, I must have be¬ 
come polyglot in my cups. According to that report 
it seems the Governor threw off, (I wonder he did not 
do something else), with the Queen’s health in French : 
to which I responded in the same language. Then 
the Rector, in English, proposed my health.,'—under 
the circumstances a cruel mockery,—but to which, ill 
F 
