eye-patients at Warsaw and come to preside at the coming out of his
_kara lingvo_, now well on in her 'teens, and about to leave the
academic seclusion of scholastic use and emerge into the larger sphere
of social and practical activity.

On Saturday evening, August 5, at eight o'clock, the Boulogne Theatre
was packed with a cosmopolitan audience. The unique assembly was
pervaded by an indefinable feeling of expectancy; as in the lull before
the thunderstorm, there was the hush of excitement, the tense silence
charged with the premonition of some vast force about to be let loose
on the world. After a few preliminaries, there was a really dramatic
moment when Dr. Zamenhof stood up for the first time to address his
world-audience in the world-tongue. Would they understand him? Was their
hope about to be justified? or was it all a chimera, "such stuff as
dreams are made on"?

_Gesinjoroj_ (= Ladies and gentlemen)—the great audience
craned forward like one man, straining eyes and ears towards the
speaker,—_Kun granda plezuro mi akceptis la proponon..._ The
crowd drank in the words with an almost pathetic agony of anxiety.
Gradually, as the clear-cut sentences poured forth in a continuous
stream of perfect lucidity, and the audience realized that they were
all listening to and all understanding a really international speech
in a really international tongue—a tongue which secured to them, as
here in Boulogne so throughout the world, full comprehension and a
sense of comradeship and fellow-citizenship on equal terms with all
users of it—the anxiety gave way to a scene of wild enthusiasm. Men
shook hands with perfect strangers, and all cheered and cheered again.
Zamenhof finished with a solemn declamation of one of his hymns (given
as an appendix to this volume, with translation), embodying the lofty