re beer, but it will effectually spoil the wine.
This process is not so much one of displacement as of corruption, it
takes place readily in uncultivated minds, with feeble separating
powers. Another example of this was a Neapolitan servant of an English
gentleman, who mixed his Italian twice, first with French and afterwards
with English, producing a compound intelligible to nobody but himself,
if indeed he himself understood it. At the time I knew him, the man had
no means of communication with his species. When his master told him to
do anything, he made a guess at what was likely to be for the moment his
master's most probable want, and sometimes hit the mark, but more
generally missed it. The man's name was Alberino, and I remember on one
occasion profiting by a mistaken guess of his. After a visit to
Alberino's master, my servant brought forth a magnificent basket of
trout, which surprised me, as nothing had been said about them. However,
we ate them, and only discovered afterwards that the present was due to
an illusion of Alberino's. His master had never told him to give me the
trout, but he had interpreted some other order in that sense. When you
asked him for mustard, he would first touch the salt, and then the
pepper, etc., looking at you inquiringly till you nodded assent. Any
attempt at conversation with Alberino was sure to lead to a perfect
comedy of misunderstandings. He never had the remotest idea of what his
interlocutor was talking about; but he pretended to catch your meaning,
and answered at haphazard. He had a habit of talking aloud to himself,
"but in a tongue no man could understand."

It is a law that cultivated people can keep languages apart, and in
their purity, better than persons who have not habits of intellectual
analysis. When I lived in Scotland three languages were spoken in my
house all day long, and a housemaid came to us from the Lowlands who
spoke nothing but Lowland Scotch. She used to ask what was the French
for this thing or that, and then what was the Gaelic for it. Having been
answered, she invariably asked the farther question which of the three
words, French, Gaelic, or English, _was the right word_. She remained,
to the last, entirely incapable of conceiving how all the three could be
right. Had she learned another language, it must have been by
substitution for her own. This is exactly the natural process which
takes place in the brains of children who are transferred from