I asked him where he had been the day before, with the long-bearded guide.
“Oh, only up to the Eismeer there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward a white and heavenly sea of ice, which shone at that moment, through a rift in the clouds, forming a horizon line of 12,000 feet above the ocean-level. It almost gave me a crick in the neck to look at it.
“Of course no guide was needed for a thing like that,” he added. “But the old fellow wanted a job; so I took him along to carry the lunch-basket. Aren’t you going to do the Eismeer?”
“Well,” said I, laughing, “I might perhaps get as far as the foot of the glacier. But I guess I should have to discount the rest.”
Corduroy broke out laughing. “Excuse me,” said he, “but you Americans are so amusing. Ha! ha! Discount! what a capital word! So expressive, you know. It means, if I understand it, that you would go to the foot of the glacier, and say that you had been to the top. Ha! ha! No offense meant.”
“Not quite as bad as that,” I replied, laughing in turn. “To discount it, in my sense of the word, is to imagine the rest of the glacier and the Eismeer at the top, from the sample seen below. Have you never discounted anything that way?”
“Ha! ha! No! no! we are never allowed to do that. Discounting would be dead against our rules.”
I noticed that, for the second time, he employed the pronoun “we,” from which I inferred that he was a member of some association of mountain-climbers. As he seemed so much amused by the slang use of the word “discount,” I thought I would favor him with a few more of our latest and choicest inventions in that line, which happened to have lodged in my memory:
“You tumble to my exact meaning now, I hope.”
“Ha! ha! Tumble to, signifying to understand, of course. That’s better than discount, if possible. I do so admire the American language. So rich, you know. Ha! ha!”