y and with a good deal of surprise; for
it was not easy to imagine whence sounds so unusual for that place and
hour could proceed. The discourse was earnest and even animated; but
it was carried on in so low a tone that it would have been utterly
inaudible but for the deep quiet of the hotel. Occasionally a word
reached my ear, and I was completely at fault in endeavoring to
ascertain even the language. That it was in neither of the five great
European tongues I was certain, for all these I either spoke or read;
and there were particular sounds and inflections that induced me to
think that it savored of the most ancient of the two classics. It is
true that the prosody of these dialects, at the same time that it is
a shibboleth of learning, is a disputed point, the very sounds of the
vowels even being a matter of national convention; the Latin word dux,
for instance, being ducks in England, docks in Italy, and dukes in
France: yet there is a 'je ne sais quoi,' a delicacy in the auricular
taste of a true scholar, that will rarely lead him astray when his ears
are greeted with words that have been used by Demosthenes or Cicero.
[Footnote: Or Chichero, or Kickero, whichever may happen to suit the
prejudices of the reader.] In the present instance I distinctly heard
the word my-bom-y-nos-fos-kom-i-ton, which I made sure was a verb in the
dual number and second person, of a Greek root, but of a signification
that I could not on the instant master, but which beyond a question
every scholar will recognize as having a strong analogy to a well-known
line in Homer. If I was puzzled with the syllables that accidentally
reached me, I was no less perplexed with the intonations of the voices
of the different speakers. While it was easy to understand they were of
the two sexes, they had no direct affinity to the mumbling sibilations
of the English, the vehement monotony of the French, the gagging
sonorousness of the Spaniards, the noisy melody of the Italians, the
ear-splitting octaves of the Germans, or the undulating, head-over-heels
enunciation of the countrymen of my particular acquaintance Captain
Noah Poke. Of all the living languages of which I had any knowledge, the
resemblance was nearer to the Danish and Swedish than to any other;
but I much doubted at the time I first heard the syllables, and still
question, if there is exactly such a word as my-bom-y-nos-fos-kom-i-ton
to be found in even either of those tongues. I could no lo