hens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen
different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here
and there extra parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the
parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple
of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the
majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of
it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what
the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of
ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND
GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the
monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the
nature of the flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty.
German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before
the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as to reverse the
construction--but I think that to learn to read and understand a German
newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a
foreigner.

Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the
Parenthesis distemper--though they are usually so mild as to cover only
a few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb it
carries some meaning to your mind because you are able to remember a
good deal of what has gone before. Now here is a sentence from a popular
and excellent German novel--with a slight parenthesis in it. I will make
a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and
some hyphens for the assistance of the reader--though in the original
there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to
flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can:

"But when he, upon the street, the
(in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed)
government counselor's wife MET," etc., etc. [1]

1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehuellten
jetz sehr ungenirt nach der neusten mode gekleideten Regierungsrathin
begegnet.

That is from THE OLD MAMSELLE'S SECRET, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that
sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe
how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a
German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and
I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting
preliminaries and parent