“Gretchen.  Wilhelm, where is the turnip?

“Wilhelm.  She has gone to the kitchen.

“Gretchen.  Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?

“Wilhelm.  It has gone to the opera.”

To continue with the German genders:  a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female—­tomcats included, of course; a person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it—­for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven’t any sex at all.  The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.

In the German it is true that by some oversight of the inventor of the language, a Woman is a female; but a Wife (Weib) is not—­which is unfortunate.  A Wife, here, has no sex; she is neuter; so, according to the grammar, a fish is he, his scales are she, but a fishwife is neither.  To describe a wife as sexless may be called under-description; that is bad enough, but over-description is surely worse.  A German speaks of an Englishman as the Englaender; to change the sex, he adds inn, and that stands for Englishwoman —­Englaenderinn.  That seems descriptive enough, but still it is not exact enough for a German; so he precedes the word with that article which indicates that the creature to follow is feminine, and writes it down thus:  “die Englaenderinn,”—­which means “the she-Englishwoman.”  I consider that that person is over-described.

Well, after the student has learned the sex of a great number of nouns, he is still in a difficulty, because he finds it impossible to persuade his tongue to refer to things as “he” and “she,” and “him” and “her,” which it has been always accustomed to refer to it as “it.”  When he even frames a German sentence in his mind, with the hims and hers in the right places, and then works up his courage to the utterance-point, it is no use —­the moment he begins to speak his tongue files the track and all those labored males and females come out as “its.”  And even when he is reading German to himself, he always calls those things “it,” where as he ought to read in this way: