uages and dialects.

Learned from Customers.

They found he was a simple, enthusiastic man, without much knowledge of
the world and of its ways. He had been living among books practically all
his life, and they represented everything to him, and for them he had
sacrificed practically everything. But underneath the naivete there were
the solidity and thoroughness of the scholar. Trombetti had cultivated his
natural aptitude for languages by the most exhaustive studies and at a
cost few men would care to meet. After the dull routine and hard work of
the school year he employed his vacations in traveling about from one
library to another in order to consult and study the books he could not
afford to buy. On these trips black bread, wayside pot-herbs, and fruit
given him from vineyards and orchards formed his fare.

He managed to buy some books, painfully saving the money cent by cent, and
when other scholars discovered him he had already gathered together a
fairly good library. In that library the chief place was occupied by a
tattered old French grammar, a book he had bought for five cents when a
boy, and from which he had learned his first foreign language.

"How did you manage to acquire such an amount of knowledge?" one of the
judges asked him.

"I began when I was a barber," he said.

"A barber!"

"Yes. When a man sat in my chair I let him talk. I got from one a new
word, from another a new variation in dialect. So even there I was
learning all the time."

Faculty Not Easily Acquired.

The faculty of learning languages, he said, was not easily acquired. It
took him longer to gain a reading knowledge of French, despite the fact
that French and Italian have an enormous number of words derived from the
same common source, than it took him to learn Russian and Hebrew--the
fifth and sixth languages he began to study--although both the latter are
much more difficult than French.

"I had taught myself how to study," he said, "how to systematize, and make
everything I had previously learned help me in everything I undertook. I
know from my own case that any one can learn a language if he is
determined and will give a little time each day to it."

So, by pursuing the method he had learned, Trombetti had placed himself,
as far as the number of languages understood is concerned, with Cardinal
Mezzofanti, who spoke fifty-eight.

The winning of the king's prize when Trombetti was thirty-seven years old,
and afte