"_Narrheit!_" growled the professor, beginning to walk away.
"Well, I'm very much obliged to you," said Brent. "Good-morning."
Then he followed his friend, who was already descending a hill in the road.
"Sister Rena, what did that man want still?" asked the little boy.
"I don't know, love," said his sister faintly. Her ideas were in a hopeless state of confusion, and she was troubled by a fear that a lack of intelligence had made her seem disobliging.
When Brent overtook the professor, the latter said, "All Englishmen are ridiculous; and you are a good specimen of the race. Why should you stop on the public highway and talk nothingness to a harmless girl?"
"All Germans are prejudiced; and Professor Helfenstein is a true _Deutscher_," answered Brent. "My remarks to the young Non-Sueve no doubt interested her deeply, and I fancy she will reflect on them, as Piers Plowman says,--
With inwit and outwit, Imagynyng and studie."
They were both good walkers, and, though the heat became somewhat oppressive at noon, they did not halt until they had reached the village where they intended to pass the night. In this place Helfenstein heard the Pennsylvania-German dialect spoken to his heart's content. After dinner he sat on the porch of the inn for several hours, talking to a number of the indigenes and making copious notes.
When Brent returned from a visit to one of the village stores, he found him looking over the result of his investigations.
"Will the 'Allgemeine Zeitung' have the benefit of your researches?" asked the Englishman.
"Most like. The people at home love to have tidings of shoots from the old German lingual stock. The dialect of this locality is a truly noteworthy one."
"I heard it spoken just now by the young blossom we met on the road this morning."
"No. She had driven in to the village to make some purchases. Her father is one Reinfelter, who tills the soil of his ancestral demesne over there near the mountains."
"From the tradesman with whom she had been talking."
"Will agnosticism let you be absolutely sure his statements are true?"
"No; and even less sure that they are untrue. It seems to me that a vast amount of credulity is needed for positive unbelief. Do atheists ever have doubts about anything?"