The chatty old gentleman got off at the next halte.
CHAPTER V.
THE ‘COMPENDIOUS GUIDE’ ON DUTCH SYNTAX.
Boyton’s monograph on pronunciation is his finest piece of work. He never quite reaches that level elsewhere; and, if he is destined after a hundred and fifty years to achieve a name, it had better rest on his ‘Doctrine of the Native’ than on his Syntax.
So van Dam assured us, when our little party met in his room the week before Christmas.
We had all been busy; but busy or not, the Cape men found time to skim over Boyton’s entertaining paragraphs, as, indeed, we guessed, from the frequent guffaws and readings that reached us from time to time through the closed doors. To night we had accepted an invitation to supper, before the holidays; and we were to hear his views on O’Neill’s ‘Guide, Philosopher and Friend’, Boyton,—in other words the ‘Wegwijzer tot de nederduitsche taal’. Long since Jack had, indeed, got other and more modern manuals of Dutch, so that he was supposed to look now with a certain contempt on his former monitor: but the “compendious guide” had laid the basis of his erudition, and he had still a sneaking regard for its honest old pages.
NO DEFINITE RULES.
What we wanted, indeed, was stories from Jack himself: but we had exhausted the more dramatic of these; and to get the fine aroma of the others—there were still many others—we thought some acquaintance with the compendium’s syntax was essential.
Van Dam had undertaken to put us up to any niceties he had been struck with.