After the first few weeks spent in sight-seeing I had a great deal of time left to myself; my friend was often I did not know where.  When not with him, I spent the day nosing about all the curious nooks and corners of Paris; of this I never grew tired.  At night I usually went to some theatre, but always ended up at the big cafe on the Grands Boulevards.  I wish the reader to know that it was not alone the gaiety which drew me there; aside from that I had a laudable purpose.  I had purchased an English-French conversational dictionary, and I went there every night to take a language lesson.  I used to get three or four of the young women who frequented the place at a table and buy beer and cigarettes for them.  In return I received my lesson.  I got more than my money’s worth, for they actually compelled me to speak the language.  This, together with reading the papers every day, enabled me within a few months to express myself fairly well, and, before I left Paris, to have more than an ordinary command of French.  Of course, every person who goes to Paris could not dare to learn French in this manner, but I can think of no easier or quicker way of doing it.  The acquiring of another foreign language awoke me to the fact that with a little effort I could secure an added accomplishment as fine and as valuable as music; so I determined to make myself as much of a linguist as possible.  I bought a Spanish newspaper every day in order to freshen my memory of that language, and, for French, devised what was, so far as I knew, an original system of study.  I compiled a list which I termed “Three hundred necessary words.”  These I thoroughly committed to memory, also the conjugation of the verbs which were included in the list.  I studied these words over and over, much as children of a couple of generations ago studied the alphabet.  I also practiced a set of phrases like the following:  “How?” “What did you say?” “What does the word ——­ mean?” “I understand all you say except ——.”  “Please repeat.”  “What do you call ——?” “How do you say ——?” These I called my working sentences.  In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself—­where I learned to speak merely by speaking.  This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching.  I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time.  A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand.  A small vocabulary, the smaller the better, which embraces the common, everyday-used ideas, thoroughly mastered, is the key to a language.  When that much is acquired the vocabulary can be increased simply by talking.  And it is easy.  Who cannot commit three hundred words to memory?  Later I tried my method, if I may so term it, with German, and found that it worked in the same way.

I spent a good many evenings at the Opera.  The music there made me strangely reminiscent of my life in Connecticut; it was an atmosphere in which I caught a fresh breath of my boyhood days and early youth.  Generally, in the morning after I had attended a performance, I would sit at the piano and for a couple of hours play the music which I used to play in my mother’s little parlor.