Page:Troy-and-its-remains by Heinrich Schliemann.djvu/68

take me more than six weeks to write each of these languages and to speak them fluently. But my passion for study caused me to neglect my mechanical occupation in the office, especially when I began to consider it beneath me. My principals would give me no promotion; they probably thought that a person who shows his incapacity for the business of a servant in an office is therefore quite worthless for any higher duties.

At last, through the intercession of my worthy friends, L. Stoll of Mannheim and Ballauff of Bremen, I had the good fortune to obtain a situation as correspondent and bookkeeper in the office of Messrs. B. H. Schröder and Co. in Amsterdam, who engaged me at a salary of 1200 francs (48/.); but when they saw my zeal, they paid me 2000 francs as an encouragement. This generosity, for which I shall ever be grateful to them, was in fact the foundation of my prosperity; for, as I thought that I could make myself still more useful by a knowledge of Russian, I set to work to learn that language also. But the only Russian books that I could procure were an old grammar, a lexicon, and a bad translation of Telemachus. In spite of all my inquiries I could not find a teacher of Russian, for no one in Amsterdam understood a word of the language: so I betook myself to study without a master, and, with the help of the grammar, I learnt the Russian letters and their pronunciation in a few days. Then, following my old method, I began to write short stories of my own composition and to learn them off by heart. As I had no one to correct my work, it was, no doubt, very bad indeed, but I tried at the same time to correct my faults by the practical exercise of learning Telemachus by heart. It occurred to me that I should make more progress if I had some one to whom I could relate the adventures of Telemachus; so I hired a poor Jew for 4 francs a week, who had to come every evening for two hours to listen to my Russian recitations, of which he did not understand a syllable.

As the ceilings of the rooms in Holland consist of single boards, people on the ground-floor can hear what is said in the third storey. My recitations therefore, delivered in a loud voice, annoyed the other tenants, who complained to the landlord, and twice during my study of the Russian language I was forced to change my lodgings. But these inconveniences did not diminish my zeal, and in the course of six