to mark the rovings of such a trespasser ulterior motives on his part are invariably suspected, and not invariably without cause.

By now, acting in the capacity of herd on the Long Farm, Tom was about to break the law doubly, as he should by rights have been attending school. If he had had any voice in the matter, perhaps he would not have played truant, for he had no special aversion from his studies, and would have felt more at home in a schoolroom than among those strange, lonely roads, burdened with the anxious charge of unfamiliar beasts. To his city-trained eyes there was something quite alarming about the aspect of the lane with nobody in sight. He had a vague impression that "the pólis" must be in some way accountable for it.

But his grandmother had not consulted him at all. She was an elderly woman, who in purblindness of outlook and love of the moment's ease matched with any ancient Athenian citizen ever subjected to Demosthenes' rebuke. And the immediate convenience of a boy to keep an eye on the poor cow that hadn't a blade of grass left up in the little field would have seemed to Mrs. Corrigan a complete justification of her improvident policy, apart from the fact that she looked on the pursuit of learning in general as time wasted over what she called "ould thrash." Apprehensions of possible visits from the attendance inspector perturbed her slightly; about her grandson's illiterate future she was not troubled in the least.

Starting him off down the boreen she recapitulated some of her many injunctions: "Just let Sheeda traipess along with herself easy, and be picking her bit. But turn her out of any open gate you might go by. And don't for your life let her get down into a ditch, or she'll very likely break her

leg on us. If you meet e'er a constable you can be shoo-shooing her, and letting on you're driving her somewhere." At this point of his instructions Tom nodded understandingly; not in vain had he dodged the Dublin Metropolitan Police Force ever since he was steady on his feet. "As for the little goats," his grandmother continued, "they'll be no bother to you; well hobbled they are, and can't contrive any harm. So troop off with them now like a good child, and I'll be fetching you home towards dinner time."

Sheeda, a red cow, placid though uncomfortably lean, led the way at a leisurely pace, and the two smokecolored goats, much impeded by their bonds, pattered after her fitfully. To the end of the boreen and round the corner into a wider lane Tom followed them without misadventure. He marveled greatly at the tall hedges, where frost-touched bracken lit fronded fire beneath, with above it bright leaves and berries and rose-hips and haws, to make the interlaced twigs seem full of glowing embers and sparks and little scarlet flames. A few samples snatched in haste, for he dared but briefly take his eyes off his charges, showed him the sweetness of the really black blackberries, and the harsh sourness of those that were still red or green. "Och the ugly stuff," he spluttered, as his visage slowly unscrewed itself from its wry grimace. "I never got the like of that up in Dublin, I can tell you, not if it was a big lump of a hard gooseberry, fit to break every tooth out of your head," he said, addressing the cow for want of company. But she stepped on her way with a stolid saunter, and gave him no encouragement to keep up the

conversation.

Presently they came where, near a cross-roads, there was a good-sized, three-cornered patch of grass. A

white cow was grazing on it, and under a neighboring furze-bush sat a small blue-frocked girl of about Tom's age. Here Sheeda paused in her leisurely stroll, and began to munch with a steadiness which betokened that she would not soon move on again. Now for some time past the two goats, despite his grandmother's promise on their behalf, had been causing Tom serious concern. Their plight appeared to him extremely pitiable. Not only were their legs hobbled with hay-ropes, but each beast was fastened to the other by its neck in close and most reluctant companionship. The younger and livelier goat constantly struggled to break away, and they dragged one another to and fro in a really distressful manner. Commiseration, edged by the consciousness of a new knife in his pocket, made Tom wish eagerly to release them, an opportunity for doing which was given by this halt. As he fumbled at their fastenings the little girl came over the grass and stood looking on.

"What are you at with them?" she inquired.

"About sundering them I am," he said. "They do be choking theirselves tugging and pulling."

"Playing the mischief on you they'll be if you do that," she said warningly.

Implied advice from a contemporary, and a girl at that, seemed to Tom an altogether inacceptable form of a thing he was never loth to refuse. So he simply ignored her remark. For although his tongue did just then shoot out a long way, we may suppose it merely an automatic action, due to his difficulty in severing the toughly twisted strands with his blunt and tinny blade. The little girl withdrew, nor offered him any further counsel; but she was to see her prediction speedily fulfilled. No sooner did the young goat find itself at liberty than it sped like a well-aimed dart up a

stony cart-track climbing the steep hillside at right angles with the road. Having lost a few seconds in staring aghast Tom gave headlong chase, and as he ran off called, oblivious of his snub, upon Miss Sibyl-Cassandra to be looking after the cow.

He might as well have chased a gust of wind for any chance he had of catching it up and laying hands on it. When after a long interval he returned to the grass-plot the two cows indeed and the little girl were still there, but not a goat was in sight. "They've both went and gone on me now, I suppose," he said to himself dismayed. But the little girl reported a still more serious state of affairs.

"You'll be killed alive when Widdy Corrigan gets hold of you," she remarked cheerfully. "If it's the goats you're looking for yet, Mrs. O'Rourke up the road there's after getting the two of them in her garden a while ago. They have most of her cabbages ate, and they knocked down a plant in a pot that she had growing for a prize at the show; and one of them's swallied the sleeve of a good flannel shirt she was drying on the hedge. Raging she is. And there she is this minute speaking to Widdy Corrigan at the corner of the lane."

Clearly their shrill discourse was nowise amicable. Mrs. O'Rourke's threats of complaining to the police and taking out summonses for trespass were in fact with difficulty turned aside by Mrs. Corrigan's frank admission that her grandson was the most ignorant little spalpeen in Ireland, with no more sense in his head than a boiled turnip, and her vows that never again would she trust him with the minding of so much as a lame chicken.

This was quite sincerely her opinion of Tom's mental powers. "Sure any infant child," she said to herself afterwards, "might know better than to be meddling with the ropes on a

goat." She had been so used to these animals all the days of her life that she was quite incapable of imagining Tom's complete unfamiliarity with their habits. Failing to account for The Saturday Review.

his conduct by mere ignorance she drew the inference that "he must be a born fool," and her conclusion was: "I'll pack him off to school tomorrow. Sorrow aught else he's fit for."

Jane Barlow.

It is interesting to the Dickensian to note that our great Victorian novelist is fully recognized as an authority on words by our modern makers of English dictionaries. There are a large number of quotations from him in the Century Dictionary, for instance, and by no means a few in that Magnum Opus of a Dictionary, which was the life's work of the late Sir James Murray, and which, owing to his death, will have to be completed by other hands.

How many actual words Dickens had at his command I am unable to say, but certainly, one thinks, as novelists go, a pretty large number. No novelist, of course, can hope to vie with the poets in this respect, unless, indeed, he happens to be a poet himself. Whereas Shakespeare had a vocabulary of fifteen thousand different words, and Milton one of eight thousand such, your modern English novelist at his best is stated roughly to use about four thousand, while your common or garden novelist -either the gentleman who spins out a few hundred pages of the regular stuff about two men and a woman, or the gentleman who piles sensation on sensation and is continually being "continued in our next". - worries along, for the most part, with a beggarly two thousand.

Dickens's vocabulary was certainly copious. Not only every word of current speech he had ever read or heard uttered, but every word, too, used in an uncommon, particular,

and peculiar way, seems to have reposed in his memory to be called up for service at the right moment. He had no use for recondite words, exotic words, words flowering in the hothouses of literary forcers such as R. L. Stevenson, a delighter in terms rare as strawberries in March. Your really popular author cannot afford to write even a shade above the heads of the big public. The honest, time-honored phraseology of the poets left some mark upon Dickens's most literary passages, but it was all natural with him; there was no searching of dictionaries for bizarre and out-of-the-way epithets. Though at times he piled adjective on adjective, they were thoroughly sound, straightforward, respectable adjectives; one and all privates in an army with no need to carry hidden discs of identification. Peculiarly rich was Dickens, one thinks, in the idioms of common speech, strange nuances of expression that made for a vigorous colloquialism in dialogue; rich again in terms defining the whole medley of concrete objects that help to make everyday life what it is. He knew the right name of everything of that sort, and exactly appraised the distinction between it and something a little bit different. Not that a show of technical terms in the Kipling style was in his line at all, but he had that happy knack of always hitting the right nail with the right word that, apart from all else, makes his works a storehouse of information, odd, quaint, and

curious, for future generations. The title of his periodical exactly hits off his philological genius. He was, before all, the supreme master of "Household Words."

Still,

Apart from proper names, Dickens was not much given to coining words of his own, after the fashion of some authors, who, either out of the fullness of their fancy, or because the right word in current use eludes them at the moment, strike out in a flash some vivid, original term that may, or may not, pass into literary parlance. The correct term in common usage sprang as a rule too readily to the point of Dickens's pen for that. there may be a few exceptions, quaint inventions of the moment to express a nice shade of meaning for which there was no existent word. For instance Murray gives no other authority than Dickens for the word "Maudlinism." "Mr. Benjamin Allen had perhaps a greater predisposition to maudlinism than he had ever known before." But it would be rash to assume, perhaps, that there is no earlier example of it. There seems more certainty of the compound term "dinner-furniture" being original. Of Twemlow, in Our Mutual Friend, he wrote, "An innocent piece of dinnerfurniture that went upon easy castors." One imagines it a spontaneous invention.

As we might expect, dining and the table, food and drink in general, provide us with not a few Dickensian quotations. Here are some such from Murray with the word illustrated in each case in italics. "I had hoped

to have seen you three gentlemen... with your legs under the mahogany in my humble parlor," from the Old Curiosity Shop. Also from the same book, "White tablecloth and cruet-stand complete." "The table-cloth and spoons, and castors," from All the Year Round. "A dinner

napkin will not go into a tumbler," from Great Expectations. "Mrs. Pipchin made a special repast of muttonchops," from Dombey. "For it would seem that Purl must be taken early," from Our Mutual Friend. "A dish of walnuts and a decanter of rich-colored sherry are placed upon the table," from Edwin Drood.

Another class of word for which Murray frequently quotes Dickens as authority is the one of colloquial or slangy nature. "'Here's a lark,' shouted half a dozen hackney-coachmen." "Mr. Lumbey shook his head with great solemnity as though to imply that he supposed she must have been rather a dazzler." "I'll play Old Gooseberry with the office, and make you glad to buy me out at a good high figure." "Now listen, you young limb,' whispered Sikes." "I should have given him a rattler for himself, if Mrs. Boffin hadn't thrown herself betwixt us." "Jack Dawkins-lummy Jack." "I'm jiggered if I don't see you home." "Some of the richest sort you ever lushed." "It can't be worth a mag to him." "He is so jolly green,' said Charlie." And many more of the same sort.

in a

Slang is a thing, of course, continual state of flux. Many terms spring up to enjoy a butterfly existence, have their little day, linger, and die out. Some of the quaint expressions in Dickens that the casual reader might be disposed to look on as original, are really pieces of forgotten slang. Dick Swiveller's "modest quencher" is a case in point. There are other terms, however, that have a hardier life. Some of these, indeed, seem astonishingly old; have perhaps dropped out of sight for a time and then bobbed up again serenely, because the race can't get on without them. We all know how "I don't think" is to be found in Martin Chuzzlewit and Mr. Asquith's "Wait

and see" in Dombey. But take the common expression "Rather" as an intensified affirmative. It has been a good deal to the fore this last twenty years or so, but who would imagine that it went back much beyond that? Not many, I think. Yet such is the case. Murray is able to give a quotation for it from the Sketches by Boz: "Do you know the mayor's house?' 'Rather,' replied the boots significantly." One wonders how old it is.

Of all the slang words in Dickens, there is probably none less known than "gonoph," or "gonof," as it is sometimes written, which Murray gives simply as meaning "pickpocket." Hotten attaches the meaning "expert thief" to it, a "master hand" at the game. One of the more recent slang dictionaries gives it also a simpler, and apparently older, meaning of "young fool or lout." The precise significance that Dickens attached to it seems a little uncertain, but personally I lean to the simpler sense. "He's as obstinate a young gonoph as I know," says the policeman in Bleak House of poor Jo. Oddly enough for Murray, he gives no earlier quotation for the use of it than this, yet the Slang Dictionaries assure us the word is centuries old. In Ket's Rebellion in the reign of Edward VI, a song was sung by the insurgents containing it. The country gnoffes, Hob, Dick, and Hick,

With clubbes and clouted shoon.

A derivative from "gonoph" is "gun" common slang term for "thief," "rascal," "beggar," and doubtless a new term "gunner" (unknown to Murray or the Slang Dictionaries) is a near relation. I glean this last word from a short, humorous article in the "Daily Mail" of last August: "a passing party of four Piccadilly ‘gunners' sporting fellows who can play a hand of cards with the best and

never lose." "Magsman" is another thief's term for which we find a Dickens quotation. "Tally-ho Thompson was a famous horse-stealer, couper, and magsman." There is no quotation for "lumper" (river-thief), but I think the word occurs in the Reprinted Pieces. Several thieves' terms are to be found of course in Oliver Twist, such as "lifer, lagged, fence, wipe, sneeze-box," etc., some of them providing Murray with examples.

There is some suggestion of humor involved in the genesis of many slang terms: what actual brain gives them to the world is very rarely knownthey just eventuate; but Brevity and Joy may be said to stand to them as kindly God-parents. Such being the case, they could not help but appeal to Dickens, who, without the least dragging them in, garners them into his works with an air of evident enjoyment. Perhaps a passage quoted by Murray from Great Expectations gives us the word-though this is hardly slang-which comes nearest to being funny in itself: "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs?"

Peculiar usages of certain words make up another class for which Murray quotes Dickens. "Natural," for instance, used as a substantive, is quoted from Barnaby Rudge, John Willet applying that term to the hero. Again, "Native" as a substantive implying man of color gives