, at length, wearied beyond endurance, she would fall
asleep before their faces.

Then she would be left undisturbed for a little while, but the moment
her eyes opened again the merciless professors flocked about her once
more, and resumed the tedious iteration of their experiments.

Our Heidelberg professor was the chief inquisitor, and he revealed
himself to us in a new and entirely unexpected light. No one could have
anticipated the depth and variety of his resources. He placed himself in
front of the girl and gestured and gesticulated, bowed, nodded, shrugged
his shoulders, screwed his face into an infinite variety of expressions,
smiled, laughed, scowled and accompanied all these dumb shows with
posturings, exclamations, queries, only half expressed in words and
cadences which, by some ingenious manipulation of the tones of the
voice, he managed to make expressive of his desires.

He was a universal actor--comedian, tragedian, buffoon--all in one.
There was no shade of human emotions to which he did not seem capable of
giving expression.

His every attitude was a symbol, and all his features became in quick
succession types of thought and exponents of hidden feelings, while his
inquisitive nose stood forth in the midst of their ceaseless play like a
perpetual interrogation point that would have electrified the Sphinx
into life, and set its stone lips gabbling answers and explanations.

The girl looked on, partly astonished, partly amused, and partly
comprehending. Sometimes she smiled, and then the beauty of her face
became most captivating. Occasionally she burst into a cherry laugh when
the professor was executing some of his extraordinary gyrations before
her.

It was a marvelous exhibition of what the human intellect, when all its
powers are concentrated upon a single object, is capable of achieving.
It seemed to me, as I looked at the performance, that if all the races
of men, who had been stricken asunder at the foot of the Tower of Babel
by the miracle which made the tongues of each to speak a language
unknown to the others, could be brought together again at the foot of
the same tower, with all the advantages which thousands of years of
education had in the meantime imparted to them, they would be able,
without any miracle, to make themselves mutually understood.

And it was evident that an understanding was actually growing between
the girl and the professor. Their minds were plainly meeting, and wh