and ludicrously inappropriate. For example, a lager-beer
saloon in one of our large cities is kept by Mr. Heiliggeist ("Holy
Ghost"); a cigar-shop in another place belongs to Mr. Priesterjahn
("Prester John"); while the pastor of a devout German flock in a third
locality is the Rev. Mr. Wuestling ("low scoundrel"). The Hon. Carl
Schurz, too, is hardly the sort of man to be named "apron," though it is
certainly true that his name is in this country sometimes pronounced
"Shirts."

Other branches of the great Teutonic family have many representatives
among us, and their names seem, to the uninitiated, even more fearfully
and wonderfully constructed than those of their German cousins. It
produces a good deal of surprise in the mind of an American to see on
the sign of a tradesman from Belgium the familiar name of Cox spelled
"Kockx;" and the Norwegian patronymic Trondhjemer ("Drontheimer"),
though a very mild specimen of the language, has a formidable aspect to
the general beholder.

The German-Hebrew names display such an exuberant Eastern fancy in their
composition as to suggest the inquiry whether they are not really but
German translations of their possessors' original Oriental titles. It is
not unlikely that this was the origin of names like Rosenthal ("Vale of
Roses"), Lilienhain ("Meadow of Lilies"), Liebenstrom ("Stream of
Love"), and Goldenberg ("Golden Mount").

The Teutonic names, whether German, Scandinavian or Flemish, do not, as
a rule, seem by any means so unpronounceable as those pertaining to
foreigners of Slavonic race. The Russian, Polish and Bohemian
appellations, which occur frequently in some sections of our country, so
often begin with the extraordinary combination _cz_ that many Americans,
believing that nothing but a convulsive sneeze could meet the
necessities of such a case, decline trying to pronounce them at all. But
the difficulties which these Slavonic names apparently offer would, in a
great measure, be removed by a uniform system of orthography. The
combination _cz_, for instance, corresponds to our _ch_, and the Polish
cognomen Czajkowski becomes much less exasperating when spelled, as it
would be in English, "Chycovsky." The same thing is true, to a great
extent, of the Hungarian names, which are not rare in our larger cities.
They, too, would be greatly simplified to us by being spelled according
to English rules. A very frequent combination in Hungarian names, that
of _sz_ is really t