after all.
A. You don’t? Well, I do. Anyway, I don’t see how they could ever have
been such a blundering lot as to go and bury the wrong child. But, ‘sh!
–don’t mention it where the family can hear of it. Heaven knows they
have heartbreaking troubles enough without adding this.
Q. Well, I believe I have got material enough for the present, and I am
very much obliged to you for the pains you have taken. But I was a good
deal interested in that account of Aaron Burr’s funeral. Would you mind
telling me what particular circumstance it was that made you think Burr
was such a remarkable man?
A. Oh! it was a mere trifle! Not one man in fifty would have noticed
it at all. When the sermon was over, and the procession all ready to
start for the cemetery, and the body all arranged nice in the hearse, he
said he wanted to take a last look at the scenery, and so he got up and
rode with the driver.
Then the young man reverently withdrew. He was very pleasant company,
and I was sorry to see him go.
PARIS NOTES
–[Crowded out of “A Tramp Abroad” to make room for more vital
statistics.–M. T.]
The Parisian travels but little, he knows no language but his own, reads
no literature but his own, and consequently he is pretty narrow and
pretty self-sufficient. However, let us not be too sweeping; there are
Frenchmen who know languages not their own: these are the waiters. Among
the rest, they know English; that is, they know it on the European plan–
which is to say, they can speak it, but can’t understand it. They easily
make themselves understood, but it is next to impossible to word an
English sentence in such away as to enable them to comprehend it. They
think they comprehend it; they pretend they do; but they don’t. Here is
a conversation which I had with one of these beings; I wrote it down at
the time, in order to have it exactly correct.
I. These are fine oranges. Where are they grown?
He. More? Yes, I will bring them.
I. No, do not bring any more; I only want to know where they are from
where they are raised.
He. Yes? (with imperturbable mien and rising inflection.)
I. Yes. Can you tell me what country they are from?
He. Yes? (blandly, with rising inflection.)
I. (disheartened). They are very nice.
He. Good night. (Bows, and retires, quite satisfied with himself.)
That young man could have become a good English scholar by taking the
right sort of pains, but he was French, and wouldn’t do that. How
different is the case with our people; they utilize every means that
offers. There are some alleged French Protestants in Paris, and they
built a nice little church on one of the great avenues that lead away
from the Arch of Triumph, and proposed to listen to the correct thing,
preached in the correct way, there, in their precious French tongue, and
be happy. But their little game does not succeed. Our people are always
there ahead of them Sundays, and take up all the room. When the minister
gets up to preach, he finds his house full of devout foreigners, each
ready and waiting, with his little book in his hand –a morocco-bound
Testament, apparently. But only apparently; it is Mr. Bellows’s
admirable and exhaustive little French-English dictionary, which in look
and binding and size is just like a Testament and those, people are there
to study French. The building has been nicknamed “The Church of the
Gratis French Lesson.”
These students probably acquire more language than general information,
for I am told that a French sermon is like a French speech–it never
names a historical event, but only the date of it; if you are not up in
dates, you get left. A French speech is something like this:
Comrades, citizens, brothers, noble parts of the only sublime and
perfect nation, let us not forget that the 21st January cast off our
chains; that the 10th August relieved us of the shameful presence of
foreign spies; that the 5th September was its own justification