"What is the name of the place where we are going?" asked Rollo.
"I don't know," replied Mr. George. "I cannot understand very well. He is going to send us somewhere. How it will turn out I cannot tell. We must trust to the fortune of war."
Mr. George often called the luck that befell him in travelling the fortune of war. "If we were contented," he would say, "to travel over and over again in places that we know, then we could make some calculations, and could know beforehand, in most cases, where we were going and how we should come out. But in travelling in new and strange places we cannot tell at all, especially when there is no language that we can communicate well with the people in. So we have to trust to the fortune of war."
Mr. George, however, determined to make one more effort to find out where he was going; and so, when the carriage came to the door, and he and Rollo were about to get into it, he asked the porter of the house—who was the man that "spoke English"—what the name of the place was where they were going to stop.
"Yes, sare," replied the man. "You will stop. You will go to Poppensdorf and to Kreitzberg, and then you will go to Gottesberg, and then you will go to Rolandseck, where there is a boat that will take you to Drachenfels, or to Kœnigswinter."
He said all this with so strong a German accent, and pronounced the barbarous words with so foreign an intonation, that no trace or impression whatever was left by them on Mr. George's ear.
"But which is the place," asked Mr. George, speaking very deliberately and plainly,—"which is the place where we are to be left by the carriage to stay on Sunday? Is it Rolandseck or Kœnigswinter?"
"Yes, sare," said the porter, making a very polite bow. "Yes, sare, you will go to Rolandseck, and to Kreitzberg, and to Gottesberg, and if you please you can stop at Poppensdorf."
"Very well," said Mr. George. "Tell him to drive on."
This is a tolerably fair specimen of the success to which travellers, and the porters, and waiters, who "speak English," attain to, in their attempts to understand one another. In fact, the attempts of these domestic linguists to speak English are sometimes still more unfortunate than their attempts to understand it. One of them, in talking to Mr. George, said "No, yes," for no, sir. Another told Rollo that the dinner would be ready in fiveteen minutes, and a very worthy landlord, in commenting on the pleasant weather, said that the time was very agregable. So a waiter said one day that the bifstek was just coming up out of the kriken. He meant kitchen.