He glanced up with a sort of blush when I came near; but raised his hand to enjoin silence, as he found the word he was in search of, and wrote it down.
Half expecting to see prices marked, I examined some of the labels.
Nearly every thing had its Dutch name gummed on to it, such as ‘spiegel lijst,’ ‘behangsel,’ ‘schotel of bakje,’ and even on his sleeve ‘mouw van mijn jas.’
“It’s all right!” he burst forth enthusiastically. “Doing Berlitz Dutch, you see! Self-taught, too! Splendid plan. Three hundred words a day. I’ll have two thousand new nouns at my fingers’ ends before the Macs are back from the Drachenfels. Precious few things in the ordinary way of life, I won’t know then! Eh, what?”
SPOORWEG BEPALINGEN.
Then it dawned upon me he was getting up vocabulary.
“Nouns, of course,” he said. “All nouns. That’s the secret. True basis of any language.
“It’s a discovery of my own. If you know the names of two or three thousand material things, you can never be at a loss. But I stick in a proverb, too, here and there, wherever it comes handy. See?”
He held up the sleeve of his dressing-gown on which the candid announcement was made in bold round-hand: “Ik heb het achter de mouw”, and pointed to his bread-knife, which was tastefully adorned with the words: “Het mes op de keel zetten.”
Yes, I saw.