ndred words can express more spoken ideas than
a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand. A small
vocabulary, the smaller the better, which embraces the common,
everyday-used ideas, thoroughly mastered, is the key to a language.
When that much is acquired the vocabulary can be increased simply by
talking. And it is easy. Who cannot commit three hundred words to
memory? Later I tried my method, if I may so term it, with German, and
found that it worked in the same way.

I spent a good many evenings at the Opera. The music there made me
strangely reminiscent of my life in Connecticut; it was an atmosphere
in which I caught a fresh breath of my boyhood days and early youth.
Generally, in the morning after I had attended a performance, I would
sit at the piano and for a couple of hours play the music which I used
to play in my mother's little parlor.

One night I went to hear _Faust_. I got into my seat just as the
lights went down for the first act. At the end of the act I noticed
that my neighbor on the left was a young girl. I cannot describe her
either as to feature, or color of her hair, or of her eyes; she was so
young, so fair, so ethereal, that I felt to stare at her would be a
violation; yet I was distinctly conscious of her beauty. During the
intermission she spoke English in a low voice to a gentleman and a
lady who sat in the seats to her left, addressing them as father and
mother. I held my program as though studying it, but listened to catch
every sound of her voice. Her observations on the performance and the
audience were so fresh and naive as to be almost amusing. I gathered
that she was just out of school, and that this was her first trip to
Paris. I occasionally stole a glance at her, and each time I did so my
heart leaped into my throat. Once I glanced beyond to the gentleman
who sat next to her. My glance immediately turned into a stare. Yes,
there he was, unmistakably, my father! looking hardly a day older than
when I had seen him some ten years before. What a strange coincidence!
What should I say to him? What would he say to me? Before I had
recovered from my first surprise, there came another shock in the
realization that the beautiful, tender girl at my side was my sister.
Then all the springs of affection in my heart, stopped since my
mother's death, burst out in fresh and terrible torrents, and I could
have fallen at her feet and worshiped her. They were singing the
second act, b