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Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life, XV: journeys (search)
of an early service in the Church of England at Bettws-y-coed in Wales I heard a language at once rattling and melodious and found that a service was proceeding in Welsh. I remembered the school-poem by Thomas Gray called The bard which begins Ruin seize thee, ruthless king Confusion on thy banners wait, and felt that confusinot the clerical suffers through this confusion of tongues. The only physician in Bettwsycoed, a spot known by the irreverent as Betsy Coit, told us that the only Welsh sentence which he had yet mastered was the phrase ordering a patient to put the tongue out, which he rightly thought essential to his practice. Having employed this with success on an elderly peasant woman, it occurred to him too late that he had not yet learned in Welsh the request that should have followed—to put it in again —so that it is not quite clear whether the good woman is not still standing with that useful member protruded. This was a confusion of tongues indeed; and since the