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
constitutionally dissatisfied customers that an unfortunate shop-
keeper could possibly be cursed with; a customer who, after
twaddling for about forty minutes, and trying on, apparently, every
pair of boots in the place, calmly walks out with:
"Ah! well, I shall not purchase anything to-day. Good-morning!"
The shopkeeper's reply, by-the-by, is not given. It probably took
the form of a boot-jack, accompanied by phrases deemed useless for
the purposes of the Christian tourist.
There was really something remarkable about the exhaustiveness of
this "conversation at the shoemaker's." I should think the book
must have been written by someone who suffered from corns. I could
have gone to a German shoemaker with this book and have talked the
man's head off.
Then there were two pages of watery chatter "on meeting a friend in
the street" - "Good-morning, sir (or madam)." "I wish you a merry
Christmas." "How is your mother?" As if a man who hardly knew
enough German to keep body and soul together, would want to go about
asking after the health of a foreign person's mother.
There were also "conversations in the railway carriage,"
conversations between travelling lunatics, apparently, and dialogues
"during the passage." "How do you feel now?" "Pretty well as yet;
but I cannot say how long it will last." "Oh, what waves!
