With Some Familiar Phrases and Idioms EDITED WITH NOTES, EXERCISES, AND VOCABULARY BY PHILIP W. HARRY, PH.D. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ROMANCE LANGUAGES AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY NEW YORK CINCINNATI CHICAGO 7107.4859 JUN 15 1915 TRANSFERRED TO HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY June 12,1929 COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY P. W. HARRY COPYRIGHT, 1915, IN GREAT BRITAIN Harry. Fr. Anecdotes E. P. I PREFACE THIS Collection of anecdotes and familiar phrases and idioms is published with the hope that it may inspire a more determined effort on the part of our students in high school and college to acquire a speaking knowledge of the French language. The teacher of modern languages is being required to-day, and rightly so, to give much attention to the spoken language. Conversational drill must in the future occupy a more important place in class work than it did ten years ago. The teacher should no longer be overanxious that his class "cover" a prescribed amount of "ground" before the close of the academic year. For the true test, after all, of our students' knowledge of their subject is their ability to use what they have acquired. In other words, has their work in language been merely a training of the eye, or has it trained as well the ear and the organs of speech? Abundant conversational drill not only trains the ear, but it gives the student an opportunity to develop facility of speech, besides furnishing an excellent means of applying the general rules of syntax. Let the student memorize the anecdotes, thereby storing his memory with a number of common phrases, and let the teacher question him skillfully upon the text. We shall find that his hold on the language will grow firmer and that he will be stimulated by a sense of progress. The present collection of anecdotes is not only adapted to a course in French conversation, but it |