Gratitude is undoubtedly a thing that should not be attempted by the
amateur pantomimist.

"Savoury" is another. B. and I very nearly did ourselves a serious
internal injury, trying to express it. We slaved like cab-horses at
it--for about five minutes, and succeeded in conveying to the mind
of the waiter that we wanted to have a game at dominoes.

Then, like a beam of sunlight to a man lost in some dark, winding
cave, came to me the reflection that I had in my pocket a German
conversation book.

How stupid of me not to have thought of it before. Here had we been
racking our brains and our bodies, trying to explain our wants to an
uneducated German, while, all the time, there lay to our hands a
book specially written and prepared to assist people out of the very
difficulty into which we had fallen--a book carefully compiled with
the express object of enabling English travellers who, like
ourselves, only spoke German in a dilettante fashion, to make their
modest requirements known throughout the Fatherland, and to get out
of the country alive and uninjured.

I hastily snatched the book from my pocket, and commenced to search
for dialogues dealing with the great food question. There were
none!

There were lengthy and passionate "Conversations with a laundress"
about articles that I blush to remember. Some twenty pages of the
volume were devoted to silly dialogues between an extraordinarily
patient shoemaker and one of the most irritating and