out of those gates with the twenty thousand chariots of war.
"Shut the book there," said Mr. Andrew: "Since I have taken to reading I beg to suspect that the same genius that wrote Garagantua used of yore to write all the histories."
"But, in short," said one of the company, "Thebes, Memphis, Babylon, Nineveh, Troy, Seleucia were great cities once, and now no longer exist."
"Granted," answered the secretary of the Prince Gallitsin; "but Moscow, Constantinople, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Lyons (which is better than ever Troy was), and all the towns of France, Germany, Spain, and the North were then deserts."
The Swiss captain, a gentleman of great knowledge, owned to us that when his ancestors took it into their heads to quit their mountains and their precipices to go and take forcible possession, as was but reasonable, of a finer country, Cæsar, who saw with his own eyes the list of those emigrants, found that their number amounted to three hundred and sixty-eight thousand, inclusive of the old, the children, and the women. At this time the single canton of Berne possesses as many inhabitants, which is not quite the half of Switzerland, and I can assure you that the thirteen cantons have above seven hundred and twenty thousand souls, including the natives who are serving or carrying on business in other countries. From such data gentlemen of learning make absurd
