t, had grown round and over the original Moravian village.
If you wanted a breath of perfect strangeness, with an American quality
in it at the same time, you couldn't have gone to any place where you
could have had it on such terms as you could in Bethlehem. I can't begin
to go into details, but one thing was hearing German spoken everywhere
in the street: not the German of Germany, but the Pennsylvania German,
with its broad vowels and broken-down grammatical forms, and its English
vocables and interjections, which you caught in the sentences which came
to you, like _av coorse_, and _yes_ and _no_ for _ja_ and _nein_. There
were stores where they spoke no English, and others where they made a
specialty of it; and I suppose when we sallied out that bright Sunday
morning, with the baby holding onto a hand of each of us between us, and
the twins going in front with their brother and sister, we were almost
as foreign as we should have been in a village on the Rhine or the Elbe.

"We got a little acquainted with the people, after awhile, and I heard
some stories of the country folks that I thought were pretty good. One
was about an old German farmer on whose land a prospecting metallurgist
found zinc ore; the scientific man brought him the bright yellow button
by which the zinc proved its existence in its union with copper, and the
old fellow asked in an awestricken whisper: 'Is it a gold-mine?' 'No,
no. Guess again.' 'Then it's a _brass-mine_!' But before they began to
find zinc there in the lovely Lehigh Valley--you can stand by an open
zinc-mine and look down into it where the rock and earth are left
standing, and you seem to be looking down into a range of sharp mountain
peaks and pinnacles--it was the richest farming region in the whole fat
State of Pennsylvania; and there was a young farmer who owned a vast
tract of it, and who went to fetch home a young wife from Philadelphia
way, somewhere. He drove there and back in his own buggy, and when he
reached the top overlooking the valley, with his bride, he stopped his
horse, and pointed with his whip. 'There,' he said, 'as far as the sky
is blue, it's all ours!' I thought that was fine."

"Fine?" I couldn't help bursting out; "it's a stroke of poetry."

Minver cut in: "The thrifty Acton making a note of it for future use in
literature."

"Eh!" Newton queried. "Oh! I don't mind. You're welcome to it, Mr.
Acton. It's a pity somebody shouldn't use it, and of course _I_ c