Volume 99 — MISLED BY A MANUAL!

When on my Continental tour preparing to depart, I bought a Conversation-Book, and got it up by heart; A handy manual it seemed, convenient and neat, And gave for each contingency a dialogue complete. Upon the weather—wet or fine—I could at will discourse, Or bargain for a bonnet, or a boot-jack, or a horse; Tell dentists, in three languages, which tooth it is that hurts; Or chide a laundress for the lack of starch upon my shirts. I landed full of idioms, which I fondly hoped to air— But crushing disappointment met my efforts everywhere. The waiters I in fluent French addressed at each hotel Would answer me in English, and—confound 'em!—spoke it well. Those phrases I was furnished with, for Germany or France, I realised, with bitterness, would never have a chance! I swore that they should hear me yet, and proudly turned my back On polyglots in swallowtails, and left the beaten track.... They spoke the native language now; but—it was too absurd— Of none of their own idioms they apparently had heard! My most colloquial phrases fell, I found, extremely flat. They may have come out wrong-side up, but none the worse for that. I tried them with my Manual; it was but little good; For not one word of their replies I ever understood. They never said the sentences that should have followed next: I found it quite impossible to keep them to the text! Besides, unblushing reference to a Conversation-Book Imparts to social intercourse an artificial look. So I let the beggars have their way. 'Twas everywhere the same; I led the proper openings—they wouldn't play the game. Now I've pitched the Manual away that got me in this mess, And in ingenious pantomime my wishes I express. They take me for an idiot mute, an error I deplore: But still—I'm better understood than e'er I was before!