the Major when
I heard him pronounce, fluently and gracefully, this extraordinary
sentence. My mind was hopelessly lost in attempting to imagine the
number of years of patient toil which must have preceded his
first request for food, and I contemplated with astonishment the
indefatigable perseverance which has borne him triumphant through the
acquirement of such a language. If the simple request for something
to eat presented such apparently insurmountable obstacles to
pronunciation, what must the language be in its dealings with the
more abstruse questions of theological and metaphysical science?
Imagination stood aghast at the thought.

I frankly told the Major that he might print out this terrible
sentence on a big placard and hang it around my neck; but as for
learning to pronounce it, I could not, and did not propose to try. I
found out afterwards that he had taken advantage of my inexperience
and confiding disposition by giving me some of the longest and worst
words in his barbarous language, and pretending that they meant
something to eat. The real translation in Russian would have been bad
enough, and it was wholly unnecessary to select peculiarly hard words.

The Russian language is, I believe, without exception, the most
difficult of all modern languages to learn. Its difficulty does not
lie, as might be supposed, in pronunciation. Its words are all spelled
phonetically, and have only a few sounds which are foreign to English;
but its grammar is exceptionally involved and intricate. It has seven
cases and three genders; and as the latter are dependent upon no
definite principle whatever, but are purely arbitrary, it is almost
impossible for a foreigner to learn them so as to give nouns and
adjectives their proper terminations. Its vocabulary is very copious;
and its idioms have a peculiarly racy individuality which can hardly
be appreciated without a thorough acquaintance with the colloquial
talk of the Russian peasants.

The Russian, like all the Indo-European languages, is closely related
to the ancient Sanscrit, and seems to have preserved unchanged, in a
greater degree than any of the others, the old Vedic words. The first
ten numerals, as spoken by a Hindoo a thousand years before the
Christian era, would, with one or two exceptions, be understood by a
modern Russian peasant.

During our stay in Petropavlovsk we succeeded in learning the Russian
for "Yes," "No," and "How do you do?" and we congratul