While on this subject I may be pardoned, I hope, for telling of the more expeditious way I adopted to acquire the other modern tongues, which my subsequent poverty rather than any extraordinary ambition induced me to learn, in order to preserve the disguise of which I shall tell you presently.
On going into an unfamiliar country for the first time, I shut myself up in some cheap garret, with a grammar, for a couple of weeks. Then I sallied forth with a pocket-dictionary, and captured some worthless young fellow without friends or employment. To this luckless person I cleaved without mercy. I followed him—if I could not make him follow me—everywhere, and talked at him and made him talk. I argued with him over his three sous’ worth of chocolate, if we were in France, or over his boiled beans and olive-oil, if we were in Italy.
I asked him questions about everything, if we walked together in the streets; and, by the way, is it not truly wonderful how much one has to say when he has a difficulty in saying it? You may have noticed that a man who stutters, or has a hair-lip, is always talking. He who learns a new language is invariably troubled with the same fruitful suggestiveness, and often, too, with a more distressful execution.
If, therefore, the patience of my friendless tutor would sometimes flag, I would attempt to make him understand my glowing accounts of the comparative wealth of such vagrants as he was in my own prosperous, poor man’s country, advising him to immigrate. This occasionally would have the effect of restoring him to a feeble interest in life.
But if he would still persist in his low spirits, and find himself on the verge of asking me why I did not myself go back to my Eldorado of good-for-nothings, where he, no doubt, heartily wished me, then, at that last critical stage of his gloom, I would soothe and cheer him with a penny cigar. Generally speaking, this will not fail thoroughly to overcome your Old World vagabond. He will talk, and even listen, after that. The only difficulty is to know just when to administer to him the cigar: he must not be pampered or spoiled by undue indulgence and luxury.
At first, when I commenced my experiments on these unfortunate beings, and I could see them wince under my laceration of their helpless mother-tongue, I had slight qualms of conscience. Learning to quiet these at last, however, I fastened myself on the most intelligent vagrant at hand, with an almost faultless pre-calculation of my man, and subjected him to my tortures with a triumphant sense of virtue in the act, far transcending, I fancy, that experienced by your enthusiastic savant when substantiating some pet theory on a living criminal.
Nothing, I am sure, ever before impressed me so highly with the modest merit that may lie concealed in vagrancy. It would be positively surprising to any one who has not enjoyed the advantage of this desperate method of mastering the colloquial speech of a country, if I should tell how soon I was enabled by it to drop my humble tutor, and, moving out of his neighborhood to some other city in the same state, to utilize and practise upon more pretending persons, in a higher grade of society.
CHAPTER III.
STUDENT LIFE AND WANDERINGS.
BUT I must get back to Heidelberg, where the sympathetic reader will not, I trust, have imagined that I went all this time without dinners because the search for one which should be the ultima Thule of cheapness was embarrassing and adventurous. I found a place, at last, where a homely abundant midday meal was furnished me in a private family, for one gulden and twenty-six kreutzers per week,—a fraction over eight cents a day. My supper I took at a Gasthaus, in company with some theological students, at the cost of about four cents.
Many of my countrymen, who have spent large sums in endeavoring to live cheaply in the same city, will of course believe nothing of this. They have paid dearly for the privilege of being Americans. They date their experiences from hotels supplied with waiters who speak our language, and have dealt at shops on whose windows they have seen blazoned in golden letters, “English spoken.” They have, in reality, paid the teacher who taught these waiters and those shop-keepers to murder our own vernacular.