The Professor's wife said, "It scarcely seems possible to have changed
the old room so completely."

Aunt Sarah replied, "Paint and paper do wonders when combined with
good taste, furnished by Mary."

During the evening one might have been forgiven for thinking Professor
Schmidt disloyal to the Mother Country (he having been born and
educated in Heidelberg) had you overheard him speaking to Ralph on his
favorite subject, the "Pennsylvania German." During a lull in the
general conversation in the room Mary heard the Professor remark to
Ralph: "The Pennsylvania Germans are a thrifty, honest and industrious
class of people, many of whom have held high offices. The first
Germans to come to America as colonists in Pennsylvania were, as a
rule, well to do. Experts, when examining old documents of Colonial
days, after counting thousands of signatures, found the New York
'Dutch' and the Pennsylvania 'Germans' were above the average in
education in those days. Their dialect, the so-called 'Pennsylvania
German' or 'Dutch,' as it is erroneously called by many, is a dialect
which we find from the Tauber Grund to Frankfurt, A.M. As the German
language preponderated among the early settlers, the language of
different elements, becoming amalgamated, formed a class of people
frequently called 'Pennsylvania Dutch'."

Professor Harbaugh, D.D., has written some beautiful poems in
Pennsylvania German which an eminent authority, Professor Kluge, a
member of the Freiburg University, Germany, has thought worthy to be
included among the classics. They are almost identical with the poems
written by Nadler in Heidelberger Mundart, or dialect.