Also, in “A Tramp Abroad,” Twain relates the following story: while travelling throughout Germany by train, Twain and his agent, Harris, found themselves on one leg of their journey sharing a car with a vast German family, the centerpiece of which, in their eyes, was a ravishing beauty, a German girl in the bud of adolescence. Twain, unable to contain himself, does his best to make the girl?s acquaintance. Eager not to be mistaken for a tourist, he addresses her in German. She blushes at first, so he does his best to put her at ease. At length she smiles at him, nods her head sympathetically, and says in English: “So sorry… I speak only German and English.”

(He also had trouble with French: From The Innocents Abroad: “In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”)

Maybe it was his attitude? Also from Innocents: “The people of those foreign countries are very, very ignorant. [...] The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them.”