1914. In the trying time of the Civil War, a journalist named Charles Godfrey Leland began sprinkling his letters with verses on the life and adventures of a fictitious German-American he called Hans Breitmann. The people who received those macaronic verses, written in an original and skillful combination of German and English, took them more seriously than did their creator and began sending them off to newspapers and magazines. Once in print, Breitmann's ballads would not die and popular demand became so strong that, from 1868 to 1871, five series were published to satisfy it. Their popularity continues to the present day. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.