“I have always thought,” said Karl, musing once in analytical mood, “that my sixth sense owed its inception to the Babel-like jargon of languages which surrounded my youthful years. I remember distinctly being attired, on my fourth birthday, in a new sailor suit, which showed to an admiring family circle that I was rated as a first-class A.B. on His Majesty’s ship _Victorious_. We lived then in India, where my father grew tea on a Darjeeling plantation. I had a half-caste French nurse from Trichinopoly, a Mahomedan bearer, or male servant, a Scottish father and a German mother, and each member of our little republic spoke his or her own tongue when the heart was stirred. In my jubilation I endeavored to climb a creeper, and fell off the low veranda on to a path covered with sharp flints. Both I and the suit were damaged at all points of contact with the globe. My mother shrieked: ‘Ach, Himmel!’ but, being a woman of steady nerves, she soon perceived that little real mischief had resulted, and she went on: ‘Er ist zum seemann nicht geboren’ (He is not cut out for a sailor). My father said, with a laugh: ‘We should hae kepit the bairn in a cutty sark.’ The nurse flew to my assistance, crying: ‘Pauvre p’tit! Tu n’es pas assez adroit!’ whilst Abdul Khan, my bearer, tried to console my grief with his ‘Kuchparwani, batcha, mainne mitai lata!’ (Never mind, little one, I have some sweets for you.) Now, these varied exclamations, conveying many distinct ideas in four languages, of which the Eastern differed in every respect from the European, were instantly intelligible to me. Abdul Khan alone comforted me--the others hurt my pride. But the real point is that I understood them all to the finest shade of meaning. To put it plainly, sounds, and not words, conveyed clear ideas. It was the first unknown step along an uncharted road; the step a fox-terrier takes when he grasps the inflections of his master’s voice.” “I suppose that is what people mean when they say that you can never really speak a language well until you learn to think in that language?” said I. Karl laughed gently, and a dreamy look came into his eyes. At one time this would have been the certain prelude to a condition which, for want of a more accurate term, we called a “trance,” though it was far removed from the muscular or mental subjection induced by mesmerism or clairvoyance. Now he simply dropped his eyelids, took a whiff or two of his pipe, and, when he glanced at me again, there was quiet humor, not fantasy, in his big blue orbs.