I thought I had made out a splendid case for our European tongues. But a glance at the face of my querist served to scatter my vanity to the winds. There was the same inscrutable look of pity in the eyes. Everything I had pleaded, as I thought, so eloquently had only deepened the Limanoran view of the shameful waste of talent which the undefined and perpetually shifting sense of European words produced in the West. There must the ablest minds of most generations wrestle all their lives with the loose-jointed languages they had to employ, and try to get their benediction and inspiration into form for the ages to wrestle with. There must thousands of capable men and women waste their best years in searching for recondite meanings in the works these have produced. There must all the immature minds spend their youth on the hated, barren task of trying to grasp the mirage of sense in the books they learn. What progress would there not have been in Europe if all this talent and energy and time had been saved for the real work of life, if all the best thinkers she produced had been set to the labour of true discovery? It was little wonder that her civilisation was practically unprogressive, when so much of it was built on the quicksands of her language. All the shades and suggestions of meaning were but pitfalls wherein most of her men and women foundered on the journey of life. It was with mere shadows and shows that her greatest minds fought; they were not conquering the unknown and undiscovered that their fellow-men might advance in their footsteps. The night encircled them as deeply as before their preternatural efforts. How could the blind lead the blind in a land covered with mists and full of pitfalls? I had still a few arrows in my quiver, I thought. No one could deny the beauty of the literary art and the training it gave to the sense of what was fair and noble. Where will one find anything so melodious as our great poems? Where anything so harmonious as the prose of our finest stylists? A beautiful lyric can hold a nation entranced. A fine piece of prose can stir thousands to admiration. What could be more ennobling than the effect of our greatest poems on the youth of our nations, what more refining than the study of our great prose-writers?