ged lady,
a Pennsylvanian by birth, who avoided meeting us at table because she
could not speak English. And when I was introduced to her, I made
matters worse by speaking to her naturally in broad South German,
whereupon she informed me that she spoke _Hoch_-Deutsch! But I made
myself popular among the natives with my German, and our landlord was
immensely proud of me. I wasn't "one of dem city fellers dat shames
demselfs of de Dutch," not I. "Vy, I dells you vot, mein Gott! he's
_proud_ of it!"

I ended the summer at beautiful Lenox, in Massachusetts, in the charming
country immortalised in "Elsie Venner"; of which work, and my letter on
it to Dr. Holmes, and my conversation with him thereanent, I might fill a
chapter. But "let us not talk about them but pass on." I returned to
Philadelphia and to my father's house, where I remained one year.

I had for a long time, at intervals, been at work on a book to be
entitled the "Origin of American Popular Phrases." I had scissored from
newspapers, collected from negro minstrels and Western rustics, and
innumerable New England friends, as well as books and old songs and comic
almanacs and the like, a vast amount of valuable material. This work,
which had cost me altogether a full year's labour, had been accepted by a
New York publisher, and was in the printer's hands. I never awaited
anything with such painful anxiety as I did this publication, for I had
never been in such straits nor needed money so much, and it seemed as if
the more earnestly I sought for employment the more it evaded me. And
then almost as soon as my manuscript was in the printer's hands his
office was burned, and the work perished, for I had not kept a copy.

It was a great loss, but from the instant when I heard of it to this day
I never had five minutes' trouble over it, and more probably not one. I
had done my _very best_ to make a good book and some money, and could do
no more. When I was a very small boy I was deeply impressed with the
story in the "Arabian Nights" of the prisoner who knew that he was going
to be set free because a rat had run away with his dinner. So I, at the
age of seven, announced to my father that I believed that whenever a man
had bad luck, good was sure to follow, which opinion he did not accept.
And to this day I hold it, because, reckoning up the chances of life, it
is true for most people. At any rate, I derived some comfort from the
fact that the accident w