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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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293 two great volumes, to which they frequently referred, comparing them, seemingly, with the smaller books they held in their hands, like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture: so hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the click- click of the woman’s knitting-needles. When, therefore, a voice broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me. ‘Listen, Diana,’ said one of the absorbed students; ‘Franz and old Daniel are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which he has awakened in terror-listen!’ And in a low voice she read something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue-neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or German I could not tell. ‘That is strong,’ she said, when she had finished: ‘I relish it.’ The other girl, who had lifted her head to listen to her sister, repeated, while she gazed at the fire, a line of what had been read. At a later day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line: though, when I first heard it, it was only like a stroke on sounding brass to me-conveying no meaning:‘”Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.” Good! good!’ she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. ‘There you have a dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a hundred pages of fustian. “Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.” I like it!’ Both were again silent. ‘Is there ony country where they talk i’ that way?’ asked the old woman, looking up from her knitting. ‘Yes, Hannah-a far larger country than England, where they talk in no other way.’ ‘Well, for sure case, I knawn’t how they can understand t’one t’other: and if either o’ ye went there, ye could tell what they said, I guess?’ ‘We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all-for we are not as clever as you think us, Hannah. We don’t speak German, and we cannot read it without a dictionary to help us.’ ‘And what good does it do you?’ ‘We mean to teach it some time-or at least the elements, as they say; and then we shall get more money than we do now.’ ‘Varry like: but give ower studying; ye’ve done enough for to-night.’ ‘I think we have: at least I’m tired. Mary, are you?’ ‘Mortally: after all, it’s tough work fagging away at a language with no master but a lexicon.’ ‘It is, especially such a language as this crabbed but glorious Deutsch. I wonder when St. John will come home.’ ‘Surely he will not be long now: it is just ten (looking at a little gold watch she drew from |
