st
foolish people occasionally producing geniuses,--in those happy days of
undisturbed bright castle-building, the mother, who was English, of the
two derelicts now huddled on the dank deck of the _St. Luke_, said to
the father, who was German, "At any rate these two blessed little
bundles of deliciousness"--she had one on each arm and was tickling
their noses alternately with her eyelashes, and they were screaming for
joy--"won't have to learn either German or English. They'll just _know_
them."

"Perhaps," said the father, who was a cautious man.

"They're born bi-lingual," said the mother; and the twins wheezed and
choked with laughter, for she was tickling them beneath their chins,
softly fluttering her eyelashes along the creases of fat she thought so
adorable.

"Perhaps," said the father.

"It gives them a tremendous start," said the mother; and the twins
squirmed in a dreadful ecstasy, for she had now got to their ears.

"Perhaps," said the father.

But what happened was that they didn't speak either language. Not, that
is, as a native should. Their German bristled with mistakes. They spoke
it with a foreign accent. It was copious, but incorrect. Almost the last
thing their father, an accurate man, said to them as he lay dying, had
to do with a misplaced dative. And when they talked English it rolled
about uncontrollably on its r's, and had a great many long words in it
got from Milton, and Dr. Johnson, and people like that, whom their
mother had particularly loved, but as they talked far more to their
mother than to their father, who was a man of much briefness in words
though not in temper, they were better on the whole at English than
German.

Their mother, who loved England more the longer she lived away from
it,--"As one does; and the same principle," Anna-Rose explained to
Anna-Felicitas when they had lived some time with their aunt and uncle,
"applies to relations, aunts' husbands, and the clergy,"--never tired of
telling her children about it, and its poetry, and its spirit, and the
greatness and glory of its points of view. They drank it all in and
believed every word of it, for so did their mother; and as they grew up
they flung themselves on all the English books they could lay hands
upon, and they read with their mother and learned by heart most of the
obviously beautiful things; and because she glowed with enthusiasm they
glowed too--Anna-Rose in a flare and a flash, Anna-Felicitas slow and