ire about the
genitive case and the declensions of the definite article. Livy is
bully-ragging herself about as hard; pesters over her grammar and
her reader and her dictionary all day; then in the evening these two
students stretch themselves out on sofas and sigh and say, "Oh,
there's no use! We never can learn it in the world!" Then Livy
takes a sentence to go to bed on: goes gaping and stretching to her
pillow murmuring, "Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr
verbunden--Ich bin Ihnen sehr verbunden--I wonder if I can get that
packed away so it will stay till morning"--and about an hour after
midnight she wakes me up and says, "I do so hate to disturb you, but
is it 'Ich Ben Jonson sehr befinden'?"

And Mrs. Clemens wrote:

Oh, Sue dear, strive to enter in at the straight gate, for many
shall seek to enter it and shall not be able. I am not striving
these days. I am just interested in German.

Rosa, the maid, was required to speak to the children only in German,
though Bay at first would have none of it. The nurse and governess tried
to blandish her, in vain. She maintained a calm and persistent attitude
of scorn. Little Susy tried, and really made progress; but one, day she
said, pathetically:

"Mama, I wish Rosa was made in English."

Yet a little later Susy herself wrote her Aunt Sue:

I know a lot of German; everybody says I know a lot. I give you a
million dollars to see you, and you would give two hundred dollars
to see the lovely woods that we see.

Even Howells, in far-off America, caught the infection and began a
letter in German, though he hastened to add, "Or do you prefer English
by this time? Really I could imagine the German going hard with you, for
you always seemed to me a man who liked to be understood with the least
possible personal inconvenience."

Clemens declared more than once that he scorned the "outrageous
and impossible German grammar," and abandoned it altogether. In his
note-book he records how two Germans, strangers in Heidelberg, asked him
a direction, and that when he gave it, in the most elaborate and correct
German he could muster, one of them only lifted his eyes and murmured:

"Gott im Himmel!"

He was daily impressed with the lingual attainments of foreigners and
his own lack of them. In the notes he comments:

Am addressed in German, and when I can't speak it immediately the
person