The next day I was almost alone at school in the glory of having seen it, for so few people were awake in sober Philadelphia at three in the morning that one of the newspapers ridiculed the whole story.
I can distinctly recall that the next day, at Mr. Alcott’s, I read through a very favourite work of mine, a translation of the German Das Mährchen ohne Ende—“The Story without an End.”
All kinds of odd fish came to Brighton, floating here and there; but two of the very oddest were encountered by me in it on my last visit. I was looking into a chemist’s window, when two well-dressed and decidedly jolly feminines, one perhaps of thirty years, and the other much younger and quite pretty, paused by me, while the elder asked—
“Are you looking for a hair-restorer?”
“I am not, though I fear I need one much more than you do.”
“The search for a good hair-restorer,” she replied in Italian, “is as vain as the search for happiness.”
“True,” I answered in the same tongue, “and unless you have the happiness in you, or a beautiful head of hair like yours already growing on you, you will find neither.”
“What we forget,” added the younger in Spanish, “is the best part of our happiness.”
“Señorita, parece que no ha olvidado su Español—The young lady appears not to have forgotten her Spanish—I replied. (Mine is not very good.)
“There is no use asking whether you talk French,” said the elder. “Können Sie auch Deutsch sprechen?”