Page:Lippincotts Monthly Magazine-34.djvu/210

208 among all these foreign names, these De la Troumiers, Duvals, Saint-Sauveurs; nevertheless it came upon us like an electric shock to hear a familiar name, although in a foreign accent, followed by the rolling, sonorous sound, "Amerique du Nord." So our North-American Charlie went blushing up the stage to receive the Latin prize of his class, his brown head looking curiously un-French as it rose into full view. Scarcely had he reached his seat with his volumes of "Histoire Romaine," when his name was called again to receive the prize of his class for history. Then how everybody clapped and thumped as, before his seat was reached, that same foreign name was called again as winner of the prize for Greek! Only a few minutes later, and the audience again applauded, this time so warmly that a pair of North-American legs seemed quite to take fright and regularly to wobble as they mounted the stage to receive a fourth prize. A smothered giggle burst from the Americans in the audience. Mamma's fan flew up to hide a crimson face. For Charlie had actually taken the English prize of his class,—English evidently being supposed a foreign language to a North American. No wonder his legs wobbled as he went up to receive his "Mémoires de Benjamin Franklin;" and little wonder that he said to his mamma, as he rejoined us after the distribution solennelle was over and the crowd dispersing to the sound of "La Marseillaise," "You will never need to correct my English again, will you, maman?"

The truth is that Charlie's long residence in France has made him sometimes rather queer in his use of his mother-tongue, and he has consequently been nurtured and admonished by his mother in it with faithful frequency.

Now, when she says to him, as she sometimes must, "Charlie, in English we don't say cautiousment, we say 'cautiously, he is always ready to respond, "Of course. Don't I know?—for haven't I the Prix d'Anglais?"

One day Charlie came home from school in a "state of mind."

"What do you think Monsieur Agis, one of the pions, told our class to-day?" he asked indignantly. "He told them that the United States would have been an English colony to-day but for the French and Lafayette, and that French was the principal language of the country, being spoken both in Canada and New Orleans. I rose in my seat to ask him if he had never heard of George Washington; to which he answered, 'Oh, yes, Yashington was a brave man; but it was the French who beat the English.

Whereupon Charlie's mamma told us a little anecdote of her experience in Italy:

"You Americans have so much better accent in speaking our language than the English have," said an Italian lady to her one day. "I suppose it is because an Italian discovered you."

has lately given his "Redemption" for the benefit of the factories for the blind in Paris, and in the programme inserted a letter, from which we quote:

"If I had to choose one of those two terrible calamities, deafness or blindness, I do not think that I should hesitate an instant But blindness!" (he goes on, after enumerating the privations deafness would entail upon a musician and composer), "the privations it implies! the sacrifices it imposes! the virtual imprisonment of not being able to walk alone! the dismal darkness of never beholding the face of nature! the silence and solitude of being unable to read and write! As long as he can read a book, a deaf man remains in close communication with the whole circle of human thought A thousand times rather, then, be deaf than blind!"

These two evils are almost invariably compared with the same conclusion,—i.e., that deafness is the lighter form of affliction. It is conceded that deafness entails a somewhat lonely and melancholy lot; but then most pleasant experiences, it is said, address the eye