Then X turned to him and crisply said: 

“Machen sie a flat board.”

I wish my epitaph may tell the truth about me if the man did not answer up at once, and say he would go and borrow a board as soon as he had lit the pipe which he was filling.

We changed our mind about taking a boat, so we did not have to go.  I have given Mr. X’s two remarks just as he made them.  Four of the five words in the first one were English, and that they were also German was only accidental, not intentional; three out of the five words in the second remark were English, and English only, and the two German ones did not mean anything in particular, in such a connection.

X always spoke English to Germans, but his plan was to turn the sentence wrong end first and upside down, according to German construction, and sprinkle in a German word without any essential meaning to it, here and there, by way of flavor.  Yet he always made himself understood.  He could make those dialect-speaking raftsmen understand him, sometimes, when even young Z had failed with them; and young Z was a pretty good German scholar.  For one thing, X always spoke with such confidence—­perhaps that helped.  And possibly the raftsmen’s dialect was what is called platt-Deutsch, and so they found his English more familiar to their ears than another man’s German.  Quite indifferent students of German can read Fritz Reuter’s charming platt-Deutch tales with some little facility because many of the words are English.  I suppose this is the tongue which our Saxon ancestors carried to England with them.  By and by I will inquire of some other philologist.

However, in the mean time it had transpired that the men employed to calk the raft had found that the leak was not a leak at all, but only a crack between the logs—­a crack that belonged there, and was not dangerous, but had been magnified into a leak by the disordered imagination of the mate.  Therefore we went aboard again with a good degree of confidence, and presently got to sea without accident.  As we swam smoothly along between the enchanting shores, we fell to swapping notes about manners and customs in Germany and elsewhere.

As I write, now, many months later, I perceive that each of us, by observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day by day, had managed to lay in a most varied and opulent stock of misinformation.  But this is not surprising; it is very difficult to get accurate details in any country.  For example, I had the idea once, in Heidelberg, to find out all about those five student-corps.  I started with the White Cap corps.  I began to inquire of this and that and the other citizen, and here is what I found out: 

1.  It is called the Prussian Corps, because none but Prussians are admitted to it.

2.  It is called the Prussian Corps for no particular reason.  It has simply pleased each corps to name itself after some German state.