of these wonders, then if so be this miscomprehension is not
vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear
homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted this
complexion of my mood and mind and understood that that I would I could not, and
that I could not I might not, nor yet nor might nor could, nor might-not nor
could-not, might be by advantage turned to the desired would, and so I pray you
mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your kindness and your charity forgive
it, good my master and most dear lord.«
    I couldn't make it all out - that is, the details - but I got the general
idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed. It was not fair to spring those
nineteenth-century technicalities upon the untutored infant of the sixth, and
then rail at her because she couldn't get their drift; and when she was making
the honest best drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she
couldn't fetch the home-plate; and so I apologized. Then we meandered pleasantly
away toward the hermit-holes in sociable converse together, and better friends
than ever.
    I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this
girl; for nowadays, whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train
fairly started on one of those horizonless trans-continental sentences of hers,
it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother
of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she
began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very
attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had
been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way: whatever was in her mind to
be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the
history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the
literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of
him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his
mouth.
    We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon. It was a most strange
menagerie. The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could
manage to be the uncleanest, and most prosperous with vermin. Their manner and
attitudes were the last expression of