United States or Djibouti ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Her only consolation was in persuading this serene attendant to take a part in the French lessons which she made a daily point of giving to Mabel out of her own little phrase-book. "Wilkins is getting on, I think," she told Katy one night. "She says 'Biscuit glace' quite nicely now.
Miss Garland had bravely gone in, groped her way up the dusky staircase, reached Roderick's door, and, with the assistance of such acquaintance with the Italian tongue as she had culled from a phrase-book during the calmer hours of the voyage, had learned from the old woman who had her cousin's household economy in charge that he was in the best of health and spirits, and had gone forth a few hours before with his hat on his ear, per divertirsi.
Evidently she had thought she was done with them, and was not pleased to see them coming back. When she paused to take breath, Claude took off his hat respectfully, and performed the bravest act of his life; uttered the first phrase-book sentence he had ever spoken to a French person. His men were at his back; he had to say something or run, there was no other course.
But are you sure, are you dead sure, that that was the way of it? No. Then the uncertainty remains, the mystery abides, and with it the charm. Guess again. If I had a phrase-book of a really satisfactory sort I would study it, and not give all my free time to undictionarial readings, but there is no such work on the market. The existing phrase-books are inadequate.
"A man is ill." The faces were blank. Daphne hastily consulted her phrase-book. "I wish food," she remarked glibly. "I wish soup, and fish, and red wine and white, and everything included, tutto compreso." The brown eyes lighted; these were more familiar terms. "Now?" cried Assunta and Giacomo in one breath, "at ten o'clock in the morning?" "Si," answered Daphne firmly, "please, thank you."
A young but capable Scot was chosen as manager to the enterprise, and the cares of business never again afflicted Joseph Finsbury. With a polyglot Testament in one hand and a phrase-book in the other, he groped his way among the speakers of eleven European languages.
As many spectators as could find elbow-room squeezed into my room behind them. Both were gentlemanly young fellows, very amiable and inquisitive, and keenly desirous to learn all they could concerning my honourable family. Their curiosity was satisfied. By the help of my Chinese phrase-book I gave them all particulars, and a few more.
During those three days while the fairy tailors were at work our friendship had not been idle. Indeed, some part of each day we had spent diligently learning each other, as travellers to distant lands across the Channel work hard at phrase-book and Baedeker the week before their departure.
From this time their decision to go was none the less explicit because so perfectly tacit. They began to amass maps and guides. She got a Baedeker for Austria and he got a Bradshaw for the continent, which was never of the least use there, but was for the present a mine of unavailable information. He got a phrase-book, too, and tried to rub up his German.
I left mine in a phrase-book in my other coat pocket." "Oh, I wasn't speaking German," said the other. "It was merely their kind of English." The company were in the excitement of a novel situation which disposes people to acquaintance, and this exchange of small pleasantries made every one laugh, except the father and daughter; but they had the effect of being tacitly amused.
Word Of The Day