coach a girl in Greek, to pass her entrance examinations, and for this she was willing not only to give me my room and board but my laundry. I at once moved to the school, and here ended the first chapter of my American life.
I was now living in an American school, surrounded by Americans. I was to see them live their American lives. One may imagine how interested I was. The school had about a hundred day scholars, ranging from four to twenty years of age; and twenty boarders, representing almost as many States, and who—even to my untrained ears—spoke in almost as many different ways.
As a teacher of Greek I failed utterly. My pupil read a Greek I could not follow, even with the text-book in my hand. My beautiful, musical mother-tongue was massacred in the mouth of that girl, and she understood me not at all. A living, thrilling language, with a literature to-day on a par with the best of Europe's, and spoken by over ten million people, had to be considered as dead, and pronounced in a barbaric and ridiculous manner. The girl was very angry at me when I told her she did not pronounce it correctly. She informed me that the ancient Greeks pronounced Greek as she did, and that I, the lineal descendent of this people whose language had been handed down
