I swore that they should hear me yet, and proudly turned my back
On polyglots in swallowtails, and left the beaten track....
They spoke the native language now; but—it was too absurd—
Of none of their own idioms they apparently had heard!
My most colloquial phrases fell, I found, extremely flat.
They may have come out wrong-side up, but none the worse for that.
I tried them with my Manual; it was but little good;
For not one word of their replies I ever understood.
They never said the sentences that should have followed next:
I found it quite impossible to keep them to the text!