"It must have been my fault," I answered; "my knowledge is extremely limited. One picks up a little here and there as one goes about, but of course that is a different thing." "But _they_ did not understand it," he replied, "the landlord and his wife; and it is their own language." "I do not think so," I said. "The children hereabout speak German, it is true, and our landlord and landlady know German to a certain point. But throughout Alsace and Lorraine the old people still talk French." "And I spoke to them in French also," he added, "and they understood that no better." "It is certainly very curious," I agreed. "It is more than curious," he replied; "in my case it is incomprehensible. I possess a diploma for modern languages. I won my scholarship purely on the strength of my French and German. The correctness of my construction, the purity of my pronunciation, was considered at my college to be quite remarkable. Yet, when I come abroad hardly anybody understands a word I say. Can you explain it?" "I think I can," I replied. "Your pronunciation is too faultless. You remember what the Scotsman said when for the first time in his life he tasted real whisky: 'It may be puir, but I canna drink it'; so it is with your German. It strikes one less as a language than as an exhibition. If I might offer advice, I should say: Mispronounce as much as possible, and throw in as many mistakes as you can think of." It is the same everywhere. Each country keeps a special pronunciation exclusively for the use of foreigners--a pronunciation they never dream of using themselves, that they cannot understand when it is used. I once heard an English lady explaining to a Frenchman how to pronounce the word Have. "You will pronounce it," said the lady reproachfully, "as if it were spelt H-a-v. It isn't. There is an 'e' at the end." "But I thought," said the pupil, "that you did not sound the 'e' at the end of h-a-v-e." "No more you do," explained his teacher. "It is what we call a mute 'e'; but it exercises a modifying influence on the preceding vowel." Before that, he used to say "have" quite intelligently. Afterwards, when he came to the word he would stop dead, collect his thoughts, and give expression to a sound that only the context could explain. Putting aside the sufferings of the early martyrs, few men, I suppose, have gone through more than I myself went through in trying to I attain the correct pronunciation of the German word for church--"Kirche." Long before I had done with it I had determined never to go to church in Germany, rather than be bothered with it.