He was mad to learn. His whole soul craved for knowledge. All the unknown powers of his undeveloped brain began to awaken. He possessed a genius for learning languages which was almost unparalleled. With every language he learned, the next came easier. In the following six months he mastered Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian. His memory, which previously was bad, became remarkably retentive, as is proved by this wonderful feat. He did not stop to rest. His thoughts turned to Russian, and his method of learning it was not without a touch of humour. A better-paid post provided money to pay a teacher, so he scoured the city on his quest. He hunted here, there and everywhere. In all Amsterdam was not a single teacher of Russian, not a soul who understood a word of the language. Schliemann, thrown back on himself, unearthed an old Russian grammar and dictionary and began to study the language alone. In less than a week he learned the alphabet, and soon he was writing simple exercises in Russian. Somehow his progress did not please him, he felt the monotony of working alone. To lessen this monotony he hit on the plan of hiring some one to listen to his Russian recitations for the sum of sixpence a night. Every evening he declaimed in Russian to the listener. The listener, understanding not a word, sat and was shouted at by Schliemann. As the listener was paid to listen, he could not object. It was otherwise, however, with Schliemann’s landlords. They were not paid to listen, and they objected strongly to the noise their lodger made, so strongly that he was asked to find other lodgings because of the annoyance he created. If the landlords thought to stop his studies in this way, they were mistaken. Twice Schliemann was driven to new lodgings, but he calmly continued his studies, and in six weeks was writing letters in Russian. By the time he was twenty-four, this amazing young man was sent on business to Russia, and within a year he was starting in business there for himself, fully determined to make a fortune so that he could travel and realize the dreams of his childhood. The remarkable thing is that the man who revered Greece and everything Greek should spend his energies in learning so many other tongues to the exclusion of the language of his beloved Homer. The truth is that he, who had the gift of languages, was afraid to learn Greek. He dared not trust himself to begin. The desire implanted by the befuddled miller had grown stronger with the years, and Schliemann, knowing the potent spell the language cast over him, feared that once he began to study Greek, he would neglect his business altogether, and never make the fortune which was to set him free to wander in the land of Homer.