To Terry these new comers were most welcome. At a distance he professed to hate and despise the French; but now that they appeared face to face, his hate was nowhere, and in its place there was nothing but a most earnest desire to form an eternal friendship with the shipwrecked seamen. There was certainly one difficulty in the way which was of no slight character; and that was, that neither of them knew the language of the other. But Terry was not easily daunted, and the very presence of a difficulty was enough to make him feel eager to triumph over it. In his first approaches he made the very common mistake of addressing the French sailors as though they were deaf. Thus he went up to them one after the other, shaking hands with each, and shouting in their ears as loud as he could, "_How do yez do_?" "_Good day_." "_The top av the mornin' to yez_." To which the good-natured Frenchmen responded in a sympathetic way, shaking his hand vigorously,--and grinning and chattering. Terry kept this up for some time; but at length it became somewhat monotonous, and he set his wits to work to try to discover some more satisfactory mode of effecting a communication with them. The next way that he thought of was something like the first, and, like the first, is also frequently resorted to by those who have occasion to speak to foreigners. It was to address them in broken English, or rather in a species of baby talk; for to Terry it seemed no more than natural that this sort of dialect would be more intelligible than the speech of full-grown men. Accordingly, as soon as Terry thought of this, he put it in practice. He began by shaking hands once more, and then said to them, "Me berry glad see you--me sposy you berry hundy. Polly want a cracker. He sall hab penty mate den, so he sall. Did de naughty water boos um den?" But unfortunately this effort proved as much of a failure as the other; so Terry was once more compolled to trust to his wits. Those wits of his, being active, did not fail, indeed, to suggest many ways, and of the best kind, by which he brought himself into communication with his new friends. At the first repast he found this out, and insisted upon passing everything to them with his own hands, accompanying each friendly offer with an affectionate smile, which went straight to the hearts of the forlorn and half-starved guests. This was a language which was every way intelligible, the language of universal humanity, in which the noblest precept is, to be kind to enemies and to feed the hungry.