Gard's experience in perfecting himself in German met with another rebuff. Under the prompting of his parental friends in Villa Elsa he concluded at length to attend a course of lectures given by a celebrated professor who was, however, known to be of an exceptionally cantankerous disposition. Kirtley had become aware of the querulous restrictions and exactions attending the most peaceful German activities and made sure of his ground at the class room, whither he went one morning with encouraging expectations. He asked the janitor if the hearings were free and public. They were. It was the usual amphitheater and Gard entered to find only a few regular students down in the front rows. He decided on a seat alone in the center. Herr Professor, be-spectacled, soon clambered up on the rostrum and squatted dumpily. Blear-eyed he scanned the place and blurted out: "There is a stranger in the room. The lecture will not proceed until he departs." Gard, having been assured by the janitor, could not imagine that he himself was meant. The man of prodigious learning shouted angrily, throwing out his arm toward Kirtley: "Must I repeat that there is a foreigner in the audience? I shall not begin until his presence has been removed." Gard went away, incensed. Surely, he swore to himself, Teuton erudition acts so often like a mad bear ready to claw away at men and things. He never attended another day lecture. But he had to get on with his German. He decided to put an advertisement for an instructor in the Dresden _Nachrichten_. At its _bureau_ he ran counter to a lot of ifs and ands at the hands of a surly young clerk. A German, naturally gruff, only needs a small position to increase his acerbity. His newspapers display, likewise, a disagreeable officiousness, being nearly always, to some extent, bureaucratic organs. They are lords, not servants, of the public. They do not appear to want your business, your money. Gard's imperfect German balked him, too. After he had been back and forth to the little window three or four times, trying to alter his "ad" to suit the rasping individual whose face Gard could scarcely catch a glimpse of by stooping down to the aperture, an American stepped forward. He was a steel gray man of about sixty and was inserting a notice. He said he was familiar with all the rigors of such a proceeding, being a correspondent for the Chicago _Gazette_. "Perhaps I can help," volunteered Miles Anderson. "After having had scraps and fights about this sort of thing around this country for seven years--though the Germans won't fight--I've finally got the hang of it. You can save three or four words by a different jargon. I can see you are an American because you take up more room about this than necessary. German economy, you must remember."