During the first year after its publication "The Hoosier School-Master" was translated into French and published in a condensed form in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The translator was the writer who signs the name M. Th. Bentzon, and who is well known to be Madame Blanc. This French version afterward appeared in book form in the same volume with one of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's stories and some other stories of mine. In this latter shape I have never seen it. The title given to the story by Madame Blanc was "Le Maitre d'Ecole de Flat Creek." It may be imagined that the translator found it no easy task to get equivalents in French for expressions in a dialect new and strange. "I'll be dog-on'd" appears in French as "devil take me" ("_diable m'emporte_"), which is not bad; the devil being rather a jolly sort of fellow, in French. "The Church of the Best Licks" seems rather unrenderable, and I do not see how the translator could have found a better phrase for it than "_L'Eglise des Raclees_" though "_raclees_" does not convey the double sense of "licks." "_Jim epelait vite comme l'eclair_" is not a good rendering of "Jim spelled like lightning," since it is not the celerity of the spelling that is the main consideration. "_Concours d'epellation_" is probably the best equivalent for "spelling-school," but it seems something more stately in its French dress. When Bud says, with reference to Hannah, "I never took no shine that air way," the phrase is rather too idiomatic for the French tongue, and it becomes "I haven't run after that hare" ("_Je n'ai pas chasse ce lievre-la_"). Perhaps the most sadly amusing thing in the translation is the way the meaning of the nickname Shocky is missed in an explanatory foot-note. It is, according to the translator, an abbreviation or corruption of the English word "shocking," which expresses the shocking ugliness of the child--"_qui exprime la laideur choquante de l'enfant_." A German version of "The Hoosier School-Master" was made about the time of the appearance of the French translation, but of this I have never seen a copy. I know of it only from the statement made to me by a German professor, that he had read it in German before he knew any English. What are the equivalents in High German for "right smart" and "dog-on" I cannot imagine.