Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field/Bayard Taylor's German
BAYARD TAYLOR'S GERMAN
"No, I haven't got an ounce of envy in me. I once tried hard to get envious, but happily my wife interfered. I had to forget about it and turn my mind into other, cleaner channels. That was on our first trip to Europe, in 1878. On the ship we met Bayard Taylor, the poet, bound for Berlin, as ambassador to Bismarck. That, I believe, states the case more correctly than the official 'ambassador to the Court of Berlin.'
"Well, Bayard made me feel pretty cheap by his display of German. That fellow was forever talking, thinking and writing German. Compared with his, my own miserable German vocabulary was an ant-hill facing Chimborazo. And when I heard him recite whole acts of his metric translation of Faust, I wished myself in his shoes, for I certainly did envy the man his Teuton knowledge. However, when I told Livy about it, she warned me and made me promise to suppress the nasty habit. Well done, for Bayard Taylor died within five or six months, at the age of fifty-three."