iato by his friends, tire (Fr. TIRE, Anglice
PULLED) manifold revolver-shots; great panic among the spectators.
Nobody hurt."

It is bettable that that harmless cataclysm in the theater of the opera
of Wallace, Indiana, excited not a person in Europe but me, and so came
near to not being worth cabling to Florence by way of France. But it
does excite me. It excites me because I cannot make out, for sure, what
it was that moved the spectator to resist the officer. I was gliding
along smoothly and without obstruction or accident, until I came to that
word "spalleggiato," then the bottom fell out. You notice what a rich
gloom, what a somber and pervading mystery, that word sheds all over the
whole Wallachian tragedy. That is the charm of the thing, that is the
delight of it. This is where you begin, this is where you revel. You can
guess and guess, and have all the fun you like; you need not be afraid
there will be an end to it; none is possible, for no amount of guessing
will ever furnish you a meaning for that word that you can be sure is
the right one. All the other words give you hints, by their form, their
sound, or their spelling--this one doesn't, this one throws out no
hints, this one keeps its secret. If there is even the slightest slight
shadow of a hint anywhere, it lies in the very meagerly suggestive fact
that "spalleggiato" carries our word "egg" in its stomach. Well, make
the most out of it, and then where are you at? You conjecture that
the spectator which was smoking in spite of the prohibition and become
reprohibited by the guardians, was "egged on" by his friends, and that
was owing to that evil influence that he initiated the revolveration in
theater that has galloped under the sea and come crashing through the
European press without exciting anybody but me. But are you sure, are
you dead sure, that that was the way of it? No. Then the uncertainty
remains, the mystery abides, and with it the charm. Guess again.

If I had a phrase-book of a really satisfactory sort I would study it,
and not give all my free time to undictionarial readings, but there is
no such work on the market. The existing phrase-books are inadequate.
They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin
your leg they don't tell you what to say.

ITALIAN WITH GRAMMAR

I found that a person of large intelligence could read this beautiful
language with considerable facility without a dictionary, but I