_Revue des Deux Mondes_. The translator was the writer who signs the
name M. Th. Bentzon, and who is well known to be Madame Blanc. This
French version afterward appeared in book form in the same volume with
one of Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's stories and some other stories of
mine. In this latter shape I have never seen it. The title given to the
story by Madame Blanc was "Le Maître d'École de Flat Creek." It may be
imagined that the translator found it no easy task to get equivalents in
French for expressions in a dialect new and strange. "I'll be dog-on'd"
appears in French as "devil take me" ("_diable m'emporte_"), which is
not bad; the devil being rather a jolly sort of fellow, in French. "The
Church of the Best Licks" seems rather unrenderable, and I do not see
how the translator could have found a better phrase for it than
"_L'Eglise des Raclées_" though "_raclées_" does not convey the double
sense of "licks." "_Jim epelait vite comme l'eclair_" is not a good
rendering of "Jim spelled like lightning," since it is not the celerity
of the spelling that is the main consideration. "_Concours
d'epellation_" is probably the best equivalent for "spelling-school,"
but it seems something more stately in its French dress. When Bud says,
with reference to Hannah, "I never took no shine that air way," the
phrase is rather too idiomatic for the French tongue, and it becomes "I
haven't run after that hare" ("_Je n'ai pas chassé ce lièvre-la_").
Perhaps the most sadly amusing thing in the translation is the way the
meaning of the nickname Shocky is missed in an explanatory foot-note. It
is, according to the translator, an abbreviation or corruption of the
English word "shocking," which expresses the shocking ugliness of the
child--"_qui exprime la laideur choquante de l'enfant_."

A German version of "The Hoosier School-Master" was made about the time
of the appearance of the French translation, but of this I have never
seen a copy. I know of it only from the statement made to me by a German