Now let the candidate for the asylum try to memorize those variations, and see how soon he will be elected.  One might better go without friends in Germany than take all this trouble about them.  I have shown what a bother it is to decline a good (male) friend; well this is only a third of the work, for there is a variety of new distortions of the adjective to be learned when the object is feminine, and still another when the object is neuter.  Now there are more adjectives in this language than there are black cats in Switzerland, and they must all be as elaborately declined as the examples above suggested.  Difficult?—­troublesome?—­these words cannot describe it.  I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

The inventor of the language seems to have taken pleasure in complicating it in every way he could think of.  For instance, if one is casually referring to a house, Haus, or a horse, PFERD, or a dog, Hund, he spells these words as I have indicated; but if he is referring to them in the Dative case, he sticks on a foolish and unnecessary E and spells them Hause, PFERDE, HUNDE.  So, as an added E often signifies the plural, as the S does with us, the new student is likely to go on for a month making twins out of a Dative dog before he discovers his mistake; and on the other hand, many a new student who could ill afford loss, has bought and paid for two dogs and only got one of them, because he ignorantly bought that dog in the Dative singular when he really supposed he was talking plural—­which left the law on the seller’s side, of course, by the strict rules of grammar, and therefore a suit for recovery could not lie.

In German, all the Nouns begin with a capital letter.  Now that is a good idea; and a good idea, in this language, is necessarily conspicuous from its lonesomeness.  I consider this capitalizing of nouns a good idea, because by reason of it you are almost always able to tell a noun the minute you see it.  You fall into error occasionally, because you mistake the name of a person for the name of a thing, and waste a good deal of time trying to dig a meaning out of it.  German names almost always do mean something, and this helps to deceive the student.  I translated a passage one day, which said that “the infuriated tigress broke loose and utterly ate up the unfortunate fir forest” (Tannenwald).  When I was girding up my loins to doubt this, I found out that Tannenwald in this instance was a man’s name.

Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart.  There is no other way.  To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book.  In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has.  Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.  See how it looks in print—­I translate this from a conversation in one of the best of the German Sunday-school books: