Gard was glad to find a friend of his race. And after the advertisement was disposed of, they repaired to a neighboring beer hall to refresh and relieve their feelings. Anderson was smooth-shaven, with piercing gray eyes under bushy eyebrows, his head presenting the appearance of just having been in a barber's chair. With the insistent curiosity of a practiced interviewer he wanted to know why Kirtley had come to this godless land; where he was hanging out; and all about the Buchers. A bachelor, Anderson had become toughened by hotel and _pension_. He thought Kirtley very fortunate in getting right into a family where the veritable German bloom had not been rubbed off by foreigners, by boarders. It would be a most fragrant experience. Here Kirtley would see on the native heath the genuine German of the great middle class that makes up the might of the nation. "Can you read German comfortably?" asked Anderson. "What do you make of it? I've been studying it for seven years and sometimes it seems as if I hadn't got much further than the verb to hate." "You can't give me any short cuts about it, then?" laughed Gard. "Yes, I can--yes, I can. Here's a little compilation and analysis of the irregular verbs," explained his new acquaintance, pulling a green brochure from his pocket. "Only costs a mark. You can get a second-hand one at the book stalls by the Augustus bridge. I always carry it with me and con it over and over. Good for the pronunciation. If you get the irregular verbs of a language well fed into your system, you've got the language by the windpipe. "Then buy _Simplicissimus_. You'll pick up a good deal from that--the popular expressions, the phrases and exclamations that are going. If you learn to use the exclamations, it makes you interesting and well-liked. It gives the other fellow the chance to do the talking. _Simplicissimus_ and that kind of thing are better than the dry, stilted German classics--'Ekkehard,' 'Nathan der Weise' and all that discarded stuff. But remember that _esprit_ was not given the Germans, because it would hide their Boeotian stupidity." "I haven't yet seen--I suppose I shall see"--said Kirtley, "why the general American student like me is so persistently encouraged to come to Germany. Why is it?" "Because we are damn fools," heartily rejoined Anderson. "The Germans don't have education. They have instruction. The one makes gentlemen. The other makes experts. It is hard for an expert to be a gentleman. They don't have gentlemen in Germany. No such word in their language. It is a nation of experts, but that's precisely the reason it should be feared. Why, education would teach a German not to slobber at his meals. "It is his strenuous ingrowing instruction that cultivates his extreme national egotism until it has become like a boil. His racial egoism helps obscure the obscure sunlight here in Germany and blinds him. He has to wear spectacles. It is a natural cry, his cry for a place in the sun."