at they could to comfort him.

The drug that they had given him was not one of those common, cheap
medicines that lose their effect before they have been in the system
half-an-hour. He felt that it would be useless to begin another supper
then, even if he could get one, and so he went to bed a good deal
hungrier and a good deal less refreshed than when he arrived at the inn.

Gratitude is undoubtedly a thing that should not be attempted by the
amateur pantomimist.

"Savoury" is another. B. and I very nearly did ourselves a serious
internal injury, trying to express it. We slaved like cab-horses at
it--for about five minutes, and succeeded in conveying to the mind of the
waiter that we wanted to have a game at dominoes.

Then, like a beam of sunlight to a man lost in some dark, winding cave,
came to me the reflection that I had in my pocket a German conversation
book.

How stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Here had we been
racking our brains and our bodies, trying to explain our wants to an
uneducated German, while, all the time, there lay to our hands a book
specially written and prepared to assist people out of the very
difficulty into which we had fallen--a book carefully compiled with the
express object of enabling English travellers who, like ourselves, only
spoke German in a dilettante fashion, to make their modest requirements
known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out of the country alive and
uninjured.

I hastily snatched the book from my pocket, and commenced to search for
dialogues dealing with the great food question. There were none!

There were lengthy and passionate "Conversations with a laundress" about
articles that I blush to remember. Some twenty pages of the volume were
devoted to silly dialogues between an extraordinarily patient shoemaker
and one of the most irritating and constitutionally dissatisfied
customers that an unfortunate shop-keeper could possibly be cursed with;
a customer who, after twaddling for about forty minutes, and trying on,
apparently, every pair of boots in the place, calmly walks out with:

"Ah! well, I shall not purchase anything to-day. Good-morning!"

The shopkeeper's reply, by-the-by, is not given. It probably took the
form of a boot-jack, accompanied by phrases deemed useless for the
purposes of the Christian tourist.

There was really something remarkable about the exhaustiveness of this
"conversation at the shoemaker's." I should th