A Croatian merchant with whom we were talking grew quite eloquent on this subject. ‘A Croat, sir,’ he said, ‘will learn any language under the sun in three months!—a German takes twice the time. Look at me! Besides my native tongue I know German, I know French, I know Serbian, I know Latin, I know Hungarian, and I picked up Italian in a month. To know a dozen languages is quite an ordinary accomplishment in Agram. Why, one of the members elected here to-day for the Diet, speaks fourteen. Just look at our philologists. Gaj was a Croat; Vuk Karadjić was a Croat;[155] Jagić, the greatest philologer living, was born at Agram. You English, you have your powers; you make railroads, you build bridges; but the faculty of learning languages is God’s gift to _us_!’ I do not know whose gift exaggeration may be; but, making every allowance for our friend’s patriotism, it must be acknowledged that the Sclavonic races have produced a large number of eminent philologers, and it may even be questioned how far the German superiority to us in this respect may not be due to their Sclavonic blood. In Agram this same faculty is shared in a humbler degree by the peasants of the market-place, who show quite an Italian aptitude for understanding a foreigner, and are remarkably quick in taking in the meaning of signs. This faculty does not stand alone; this power of attitudinising, the very dress of the peasants, all are symptoms of a common quality. It is a certain subtle adaptiveness, common to the whole Sclavonic race.