e: so
hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock
tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the
click-click of the woman's knitting-needles. When, therefore, a voice
broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me.

"Listen, Diana," said one of the absorbed students; "Franz and old Daniel
are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which
he has awakened in terror--listen!" And in a low voice she read
something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an
unknown tongue--neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or
German I could not tell.

"That is strong," she said, when she had finished: "I relish it." The
other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated,
while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been read. At a later
day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the
line: though, when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on
sounding brass to me--conveying no meaning:--

"'Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.' Good! good!"
she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. "There you have a
dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a
hundred pages of fustian. 'Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines
Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.' I like it!"

Both were again silent.

"Is there ony country where they talk i' that way?" asked the old woman,
looking up from her knitting.

"Yes, Hannah--a far larger country than England, where they talk in no
other way."

"Well, for sure case, I knawn't how they can understand t' one t'other:
and if either o' ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?"

"We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all--for we
are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don't speak German, and we
cannot read it without a dictionary to help us."

"And what good does it do you?"

"We mean to teach it some time--or at least the elements, as they say;
and then we shall get more money than we do now."

"Varry like: but give ower studying; ye've done enough for to-night."

"I think we have: at least I'm tired. Mary, are you?"

"Mortally: after all, it's tough work fagging away at a language with no
master but a lexicon."

"It is, especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious Deutsch.
I wonder when St. John wi