Page:Diary of a Pilgrimage (1891).pdf/94

 the Fatherland, and to get out of the country alive and uninjured.

I hastily snatched the book from my pocket, and commenced to search for dialogues dealing with the great food question. There were none!

There were lengthy and passionate "Conversations. with a laundress" about articles that I blush to remember. Some twenty pages of the volume were devoted to silly dialogues between an extraordinarily patient shoemaker and one of the most irritating and constitutionally dissatisfied customers that an unfortunate shopkeeper could possibly be cursed with; a customer who, after twaddling for about forty minutes, and trying on, apparently, every pair of boots in the place, calmly walks out with:

"Ah! well, I shall not purchase anything to-day. Good-morning!"

The shopkeeper's reply, by-the-by, is not given. It probably took the form of a boot-jack, accompanied by phrases deemed useless for the purposes of the Christian. tourist.

There was really something remarkable about the exhaustiveness of this "conversation at the shoemaker's."

I should think the book must have been written by someone who suffered from corns. I could have gone to a German shoemaker with this book and have talked the man's head off.

Then there were two pages of watery chatter "on meeting a friend in the street"—"Good-morning, sir (or madam)."—"I wish you a merry Christmas."—"How is your mother?" As if a man who hardly knew enough German to keep body and soul together, would want to go about asking after the health of a foreign person's mother.