It was the third evening they had called; and as it was clear that Jack was somewhat reticent about his "linguistics", we had to guide him gently to the subject.
"Nonsense!" I said again. "_You_ had no difficulty. You made yourself understood from the first. You wrote me that."
"Well," said Jack, sitting bolt upright, "I know better now; and I stopped talking Dutch when I began to understand myself. You have to hunt in the dark," he explained, "to catch the exact word or the proper idiom--and a man likes to know what he is talking about, himself. The language isn't child's play, that's the truth. But it's a fine country. You should see the light when--"
"Oh," said the Philosopher, "we don't want to hear any more about the country. Please not. We know all about those azure heavens and the infinite horizons and the scrumbled distances and the Rembrandt cattle, and all that. Why, man, I'll undertake to draw from your own rhapsodies about those pictures an absolutely correct copy of (say) Paul Potter's 'Night Watch', or van der Helst's 'Anatomy Lesson', or Mesdag's 'Lost-Chord', and the canals and the clouds and the chiaro-oscuro. You needn't go over them again".
"But I thought", piped the First year's man, who always came in with the Professor and never quite comprehended what was going on, "I thought that the 'Night Watch' was not by Paul Potter. Surely the 'Night Watch' and the 'Anatomy Lesson' are two well-known pictures by Remb--" "Never mind what you thought!" interrupted the Professor. "Don't think, it's bad for your constitution. And above all things don't try to be accurate, or you'll get yourself into trouble."
"The Philosopher's right," I urged. "Our minds are a chaos after O'Neill's descriptions. We'll only pardon you, Jack, all that golden haze and the Rembrandts, if you condescend to plain facts. Tell us now about your Dutch. Do. We're absolutely thirsting for an account of your adventures. Or were you too timid to embark on the open sea of the _taal_, sticking cravenly to English all the time? Why I thought you had more _go_."
"Mr. O'Neill promised to master the language in the first fortnight", chimed in the First Year's man in his high boyish voice, "and to finish the principal Dutch classics in the second fortnight. Those were his very words."