he would go and borrow a board as soon as he had lit
the pipe which he was filling.

We changed our mind about taking a boat, so we did not have to go. I
have given Mr. X's two remarks just as he made them. Four of the five
words in the first one were English, and that they were also German was
only accidental, not intentional; three out of the five words in the
second remark were English, and English only, and the two German ones
did not mean anything in particular, in such a connection.

X always spoke English to Germans, but his plan was to turn the sentence
wrong end first and upside down, according to German construction, and
sprinkle in a German word without any essential meaning to it, here and
there, by way of flavor. Yet he always made himself understood. He could
make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when
even young Z had failed with them; and young Z was a pretty good German
scholar. For one thing, X always spoke with such confidence--perhaps
that helped. And possibly the raftsmen's dialect was what is called
PLATT-DEUTSCH, and so they found his English more familiar to their ears
than another man's German. Quite indifferent students of German can read
Fritz Reuter's charming platt-Deutch tales with some little facility
because many of the words are English. I suppose this is the tongue
which our Saxon ancestors carried to England with them. By and by I will
inquire of some other philologist.

However, in the mean time it had transpired that the men employed to
calk the raft had found that the leak was not a leak at all, but only
a crack between the logs--a crack that belonged there, and was not
dangerous, but had been magnified into a leak by the disordered
imagination of the mate. Therefore we went aboard again with a good
degree of confidence, and presently got to sea without accident. As we
swam smoothly along between the enchanting shores, we fell to swapping
notes about manners and customs in Germany and elsewhere.

As I write, now, many months later, I perceive that each of us, by
observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day by day, had
managed to lay in a most varied and opulent stock of misinformation. But
this is not surprising; it is very difficult to get accurate details in
any country. For example, I had the idea once, in Heidelberg, to find
out all about those five student-corps. I started with the White Cap
corps. I began to inquire of this and that a