pocket. Weird-looking ladies and gentlemen gesticulate and rave at
me for months. I hide myself in lonely places, repeating idioms to
myself out loud, in the hope that by this means they will come
readily to me if ever I want them, which I never do. And, after all
this, I don't seem to know very much. This irritating ass, who has
never left his native suburb, suddenly makes up his mind to travel on
the Continent. I find him in the next chapter engaged in complicated
psychological argument with French or German savants. It appears--
the author had forgotten to mention it before--that one summer a
French, or German, or Italian refugee, as the case may happen to be,
came to live in the hero's street: thus it is that the hero is able
to talk fluently in the native language of that unhappy refugee.

I remember a melodrama visiting a country town where I was staying.
The heroine and child were sleeping peacefully in the customary
attic. For some reason not quite clear to me, the villain had set
fire to the house. He had been complaining through the three
preceding acts of the heroine's coldness; maybe it was with some idea
of warming her. Escape by way of the staircase was impossible. Each
time the poor girl opened the door a flame came in and nearly burned
her hair off. It seemed to have been waiting for her.

"Thank God!" said the lady, hastily wrapping the child in a sheet,
"that I was brought up a wire walker."

Without a moment's hesitation she opened the attic window and took
the nearest telegraph wire to the opposite side of the street.

In the same way, apparently, the hero of the popular novel, finding
himself stranded in a foreign land, suddenly recollects that once