The herald., 1898-03-27

and interest as well as the most con-
: fident hopes of success to those who
were striving to understand the ac-
cents of her tongue.
Still the difficulty was very great,
Notwithstanding the conviction of the
professors that her language would
turn out to be a form of the great
lndo-European speech, from which the
many tongues of civilized men upon the
earth had been derived.
The learned men, to tell the truth,
gave the poor girl no rest. For hours
at a time they would ply her with in
terrogations by voice and by gesture,
until, at length, wearied beyond en-
durance, she would fall asleep before
their faces.
Then she would be left undisturbed
for little while, but the moment her
eyes opened again the merciless pro-
fessors tlocked about her once more,
and resumed the tedious iteration of
their experiments.
Our Heidelberg professor was the
chief inquisitor and he revealed him
self to us in new and entirely unex-
pected light. No one could have antici-
pated the depth and variety Of his re-
sources. He placed himself in front of
the girl and gestured and gesticulated,
bowed. nodded, shrugged his shoulders,
screwed his face into an infinite variety
of expressions, smiled, laughed, scowled
and accompanied all these dumb shows
with posturing, eXclamations, queries,
only half expressed in words, and ca
dences which by some ingenious ma
nipulation of the tones of his voice, he
managed to make expressive of his de-
Sires.
The girl looked on, partly astonished
partly amused, and partly compre-
hending. Sometimes she smiled, and
then the beauty of her face became
most captivating. Occasionally she
burst into a CHEEKY laugh when the
professor was executing some of his
extraordinary gyrations before her.
1t was a marvellous exhibition of
what the human intellect, when all it's
powers are concentrated upon single
object, is capable of achieving. 1t
seemed to me, as I looked at the per-
formance, that if all the faces of men
who had been stricken asunder at the
| foot of the Tower of Babel by the
miracle which made the tongues of
each to speak language unknown to
the others, could be brought together
again at the foot of the same tower.
with all the advantages which thou
sands of years of education had in the
meantime impaired to them, they
would be able, without any miracle, to
make themselves mutually understood.
And it was evident that an under
standing was actually growing between
the girl and the professor Their minds
were plainly meeting and when both
had become focused upon the same
/ toiv ho +ta
object of the experiment would be at
tanned.
Whenever the professor got from the
girl an intelligent reply to his panto-
mimic inquiries, or whenever he be-
lieved that he got such reply, it was
Immediately jotted down in the ever
open note book which he carried in his
hand.
And then he would turn to us stand
ing by, and with one hand to his heart,
and the other sweeping grandly
through the air, would make pro-
| found bow and say:
1.-The young lady and I grea. pro-
gress make already. have her words
comprehended. We shall wondrous
mysteries solve. Jawohl! Wunder-
licb! Make yourselves, gentlemen. easy.
OF the human race the ancestral stem
have I here discovered"
There was one thing which gave
some of us considerable misgiving, and
that was the question whether, after
ALL the language the professor was ac-
quiring was really the girls own
| tongue or one tha. she had learned
from the Martians.
But the professor bade us rest easy
| on that point. He assured us, in the
| first place, that this girl could not be
the only human being living upon
Mars, but that she must have friends
and relatives there. That being so, they
unquestionably had a language of their
own, which they spoke when they were
among themselves. Here finding her
self among beings belonging to her own
race, she would naturally speak her
own tongue and not that which she had
acquired from the Martians.
"Moreover gentlemen" he added 81
| have in her speech many roots of the
great Aryan tongue already recog-
nized."
We were greatly relieved by this ex-
PLANTATION, which seemed to all of us
perfectly satisfactory.
Yet, really, there was no reason why
one language should be any better than
the other for our present purpose. In
fact, it might be more useful to us to
know the language of the Martians
themselves. Still, we all felt that we
should prefer to know. her language
rather than that of the monsters
among whom she had lived.
Colonel Smith expressed what was in
all our minds when after listening to
the reasoning of the professor he blurt-
ed out:
'Thank God, she don't speak any of
their blamed lingo! BY Jove, it would
soil her pretty lips"
"But also that she speaks, too," said
the man from Heidelberg. turning to
Colonel Smith with a grin. 1--WE shall
both of them eventually learn"
Xxx.
Three entire weeks were passed in
this manner. After the first week the
girl herself materially assisted the lin
gusts in their efforts to acquire her
speech.
At length the task was so far ad-
vanced that we could, in a certain
sense regard it as practically COM
| pleted. The Heidelberg professor de-
i clared that he had mastered the tongue