"Yours truly, Ethel Lillian Kersikes."
PORTUGUESE WITHOUT A MASTER.
I am spending my leisure moments these days studying the Portuguese language.
It is not very generally used, it is true, but I might meet a Portuguese some day who wanted to hold a conversation with me very much, and I would feel more at ease if I could speak the language with elegance and precision.
I am working at the task silently and earnestly without a master, and I am sometimes a little mystified by the startling and original exhibitions of imported syntax and etymology as shown in the English translations given in the book which I am studying. It is a kind of Portuguese primer, designed and constructed by Jose De Fonseca and Pedro Carolino, and although the Portuguese part of it seems to be all right, I am at times a little annoyed at the novel arrangement of the English translations.
The authors in their preface seem to convey the impression that other compilers and writers who have attempted this thing have not seemed to meet the demands of the times, but Messrs. Fonseca & Carolino intimate that they have supplied a want long felt, and they seem tickled almost to death over the fact that they have the bulge on their predecessors. In their apparently modest way they say:
"The works which we are conferring for this labor found use us for nothing, but those who were publishing to Portugal or out, they were most all composed for some foreign or some national, acquainted in the spirit of both languages. It was resulting from that carelessness to rest these works fill of imperfections, and anomalies of style, and idiotisms, for this language in spite of the infinite typographical faults which sometimes invert the sense of the periods."
Parties who have become cloyed with the spicy fragrance of "Fifteen" might find pleasing diversion in the foregoing sentence. It is quaint and unique in its style, and although I consider it perfectly original, I am led to believe that there are little poetic gems from Walt Whitman in it.