a smell unpleasant if
scholastic. Dressed in a soiled, shiny, black garb, and with a
bristly mustache and beard which often showed egg of a morning, he
talked blatantly of having been in Paris as a soldier in '70. It was
his one excursion out of Saxony.

Even the German language at such a cost was not very inviting.
Finally Gard received a curt note to the effect that if he were not
more assiduous, the lessons would better end. Herr Keller did not
want to be bothered with triflers.

"Bounced from school!" Kirtley exclaimed. It was the first time. He
took advantage of this opportunity to discontinue.

He could see that his hosts did not blame the professor. Why, he was
capable of forcibly drilling the Teuton language and literature into
a post hole. This doubtless confirmed Kirtley's failure as a student
in their eyes. And this was to be looked for in Americans who think
that they can acquire knowledge and know life by gadding about and
"observing," instead of by book study. The awful German language
seemed doomed to blast Gard's affectionate hopes.

While his burgeoning amorousness met with such blighting
encouragement in the direction of Fraeulein Elsa, it encountered
unexpectedly an immense and yearning bosom in another quarter.
Fraeulein Wasserhaus, next door, clamored for a mate. With cowlike
simpleness she almost bellowed out for love. Of an age verging on
the precarious she waddled into and out from Villa Elsa with bulging
breasts so bared, under the transparent pretenses of white gauze,
that Frau Bucher declared herself shocked. She said that the
Wasserhaus was trying to be a part of the disgraceful Naked _Kultur_
that had been assailing Germany.

When this bovine soul came to know of Kirtley's presence, she
fastened her consuming desires upon him. She had a brother in
America and actively developed a hankering to go there and be near
him. Yoking up with a Yankee would be a most natural and fitting
state in which to negotiate the Atlantic.

As the Bucher wall was too high for her to hang over in her
languishing ardors, she hung over her gate to offer a book or a
tiger lily to Gard as he passed. Several times when the
pachydermatous Tekla banged her way upstairs with an armful of
utensils in her work, a bouncing compote or other unabashed delicacy
would be tumbling about on a dustpan or a slop basin, bound for the
attic room by the linden tree. Twice a belabored missive accompanied
these little couriers,