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Updated: June 25, 2025
He perceived, of course, that unless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his pleasure in it.
The very summer before last I got so far on the way in London as to buy a Spanish phrase-book full of those inopportune conversations with landlords, tailors, ticket-sellers, and casual acquaintance or agreeable strangers.
From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to adapt his tongue to the local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has formed his conception of the language from a phrase-book. The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as its speech.
"I am very glad to meet you," he said without the trace of an accent, although in that mechanical manner which makes the words sound as if they had been read many times out of a grammar or phrase-book. I took him for a Frenchman. "I must be going now, but I hope to meet you on board," I said, and we bowed again and I left him.
Then I took up the phrase-book again; but could not study, and so bathed and retired, it being now not far from ten o'clock. I lay awake a good deal in the night, but saw no ghost.
At first he did not dare go into a restaurant. When hunger forced him, he would enter a pâtisserie, point at one thing and another, take without question the change that was handed him, and return to his room to eat. The neighborhood, however, was blessed with a series of second-hand book-shops. One day his eyes fell on an English-French phrase-book. He bought it. Dîner, 2f." He began to dine out.
He perceived, of course, that unless the barber, the bootmaker, and the banker answered him in terms which the author of the phrase-book directed them to use, he should not get on with them beyond his first question; but he did not allow this to spoil his pleasure in it.
In fact, it was with a tender emotion that he realized how little the world, which had changed in everything else so greatly, had changed in its ideal of a phrase-book. Mrs. March postponed the study of her Baedeker to the time and place for it; and addressed herself to the immediate business of ascertaining the respective merits of the Colmannia and Norumbia.
From this abuse it comes about that many things which women admire do as much wrong to their beauty as to the purses of their husbands and fathers. What would you say of a young girl who expressed her thoughts in terms very choice, indeed, but taken word for word from a phrase-book? What charm could you find in this borrowed language?
"Allow me, now, as some small return for your various welcome cheques, to offer you a useful and valuable present a German dictionary, grammar, and phrase-book! "I kiss your hand. "No longer The other note was to me. It was as follows: "Ha, ha, ha; just a W misplaced sufficed to take you in, then!
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