do?" it is commonly short, and has the sound of wul, but in reply it is deliberative, and the various shades of meaning which can be conveyed by difference of intonation, and by prolonging or abbreviating, I should vainly attempt to describe. I have heard ooa-ahl, wahl, ahl, wal, and something nearly approaching the sound of the le in able. Sometimes before "I" it dwindles to a mere l, as “'l I dunno." A friend of mine (why should I not please myself, though I displease him, by brightening my page with the initials of the most exquisite of humorists, J. H. ?) told me that he once heard five "wells," like pioneers, precede the answer to an inquiry about the price of land. The first was

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the ordinary wul, in deference to custom; the second, the long, perpending ooahl, with a falling inflection of the voice; the third, the same, but with the voice rising, as if in despair of a conclusion, into a plaintively nasal whine; the fourth, wulh, ending in the aspirate of a sigh; and then, fifth, came a short, sharp wal, showing that a conclusion had been reached. I have used this latter form in the "Biglow Papers," because, if enough nasality be added, it represents most nearly the average sound of what I may call the interjection.

A locution prevails in the Southern and Middle States which is so curious that, though never heard in New England, I will give a few lines to its dis

cussion, the more readily because it is extinct elsewhere. I mean the use of allow in the sense of affirm, as "I allow that's a good horse." I find the word so used in 1558 by Anthony Jenkinson in Hakluyt: "Corne they sowe not, neither doe eate any bread, mocking the Christians for the same, and disabling our strengthe, saying we live by eating the toppe of a weede, and drinke a drinke made of the same, allowing theyr great devouring of flesh and drinking of milke to be the increase of theyr strength." That is, they undervalued our strength, and affirmed their own to be the result of a certain diet. In another passage of the same narrative the word has its more common meaning of approving or praising: "The said king, much allowing this declaration, said." Ducange quotes Bracton sub voce ADLOCARE for the meaning "to admit as proved," and the transition from this to "affirm" is by no means violent. At the same time, when we consider some of the meanings of allow in old English, and of allouer in old French, and also remember that the verbs prize and praise are from one root, I think we must admit allaudare to a share in the paternity of allow. The sentence from Hakluyt would read equally well, "contemning our strengthe, . . . . and praising (or valuing) their great eating of flesh as the cause of their increase in strength." After all, if we confine ourselves to

allocare, it may turn out that the word was somewhere and some when used for to bet, analogously to put up, put down, post (cf. Spanish apostar), and the like. I hear boys in the street continually saying, "I bet that's a good horse," or what not, meaning by no means to risk anything beyond their opinion in the matter.

The word improve, in the sense of "to occupy, make use of, employ," as Dr. Pickering defines it, he long ago proved to be no neologism. He would have done better, I think, had he substituted profit by for employ. He cites Dr. Franklin as saying that the word had never, so far as he knew, been used in New England before he left it in 1723, except in Dr. Mather's "Remarkable Providences," which he oddly calls a "very old book." Franklin, as Dr. Pickering goes on to show, was mistaken. Mr. Bartlett in his "Dictionary" merely abridges Pickering. Both of them should have confined the application of the word to material things, its extension to which is all that is peculiar in the supposed American use of it. For surely "Complete Letter-writers" have been "improving this opportunity" time out of mind. I will illustrate the word a little further, because Pickering cites no English authorities. Skelton has a passage in his " Phyllyp Sparowe," which I quote the rather as it contains also the word allowed, and as it distinguishes improve from employ : —

"His [Chaucer's] Englysh well alowed,

So as it is enprowed,

For as it is enployd,

There is no English voyd."

Here the meaning is to profit by. In Fuller's "Holy Warre" (1647), we have "The Egyptians standing on the firm ground, were thereby enabled to improve and enforce their darts to the utmost." Here the word might certainly mean to make use of. Mrs. Hutchinson (Life of Colonel H.) uses the word in the same way, "And therefore did not emproove his interest to engage the country in the quarrell." I find it also in "Strength out of Weakness (1652), and Plutarch's "Morals" (1714), but I know of only one example of its use in the purely American sense, and that is, "a very good improvement for a mill" in the "State Trials" (Speech of the Attorney-General in the Lady Ivy's case, 1684). In the sense of employ, I could cite a dozen old English authorities.

In running over the fly-leaves of those delightful folios for this reference, I find a note which reminds me of another word, for our abuse of which we have been deservedly ridiculed. I mean lady. It is true I might cite the example of the Italian donna* (domina), which has been treated in the same way by a whole nation, and not, as lady

*Dame, in English, is a decayed gentlewoman of the same family.

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among us, by the uncultivated only. It perhaps grew into use in the half-democratic republics of Italy in the same way and for the same reasons as with us. But I admit that our abuse of the word is villanous. I know of an orator who once said in a public meeting where bonnets preponderated, that "the ladies were last at the cross and first at the tomb" But similar sins were committed before our day and in the mother country. In the "State Trials" I learn of "a gentlewoman that lives cook with" such a one, and I hear the Lord High Steward speaking of the wife of a waiter at a bagnio as a gentlewoman! From the same authority, by the way, I can state that our vile habit of chewing tobacco had the somewhat unsavory example of Titus Oates, and I know by tradition from an eyewitness that the elegant General Burgoyne partook of the same vice. Howell, in one of his letters (dated 26 Aug., 1623), speaks thus of another "institution" which many have thought American: They speak much of that boisterous Bishop of Halverstadt, (for so they term him here,) that, having taken a place wher ther were two Monasteries of Nuns and Friers, he caus'd divers featherbeds to be rip'd, and all the feathers to be thrown in a great Hall, whither the Nuns and Friers were thrust naked with their bodies oil'd and pitch'd, and to tumble among the feathers." Howell speaks

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