He felt that it would be useless to begin another
supper then, even if he could get one, and so he went to bed a good
deal hungrier and a good deal less refreshed than when he arrived at
the inn.
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.
