now when he says, "That's brave music." In this latter case there is the doubling of the n to be accounted for. Just how little difficulty that may offer, will be appreciated by one who listens to the talk of the street, and who, without the context, tries to decide whether the talk is of an ocean, a notion, or an nocean. The old English rake-stele, or rake-handle, has become, to the husbandman's vivid conception of things, the rake's tail.
      As an example of how words get confused in one way and another, we may trace the verb to hill, as it is applied to the cultivation of corn. It is now made to mean the heaping of the soil about the plant, thus forming a diminutive hill. Originally this verb meant in this place simply to cover. It is likely that where Palfrey, in his History of New England, tells us that Squanto taught the English settlers to plant and to hill corn, he uses this word in its original sense. Mr. Walter White relates that in a village of Staffordshire he heard a young lady say to the bookseller, as she asked for a hymn-book, "Let me have one with a red hillin'." Here was this old Saxon word for "cover" still in use in the very heart of old Mercia.
      Even plain Latin words, which had formerly been in good and common use in England, have been known to wander off to America, and to make that country their home for generations, until changed conditions of life, or a recurring fancy, have brought the words back to their early home, where they have received the welcome given to a prodigal child. Mr. Hissey gives, in his "Holiday on the Road," an interesting example of this waywardness in verbal life. "In Somersetshire," he says, "I may note as a strange fact, whilst taking a pedestrian tour through the county many years ago, talking about a railway accident with a man I met, he remarked to me, 'The trains collided;' and this was before that good old English word (for, after hearing it, I searched for and found the term in a book bearing date 1600) had been re-employed and re-naturalized from America."
      Local proverbs seem to be about as firmly rooted to the soil from which they grew, as any forms of speech; and yet these show as strong proclivities to vagrancy as do ordinary words. The carrying of coals to Newcastle, for instance, is just as forcibly used here as it is on the Tyne. By repeating English names of places so commonly on this side of the water, some of these phrases have become curiously uncertain. The exclamation, "Go to Halifax!" had an application so pat at the time when loyalists were leaving the colonies, that few were likely then to ask whether this were ever used with reference to any other Halifax than the capital of Nova Scotia. If, however, one will look into the local history of Halifax near Hull, in England, he will find that precisely the same advice or command used to be given with reference to that town, long before its namesake in Nova Scotia was settled. The phrase, "Go to Halifax," came into use among tramps because of the strict criminal law of that place. This code may be epitomized as follows: Should a felon be taken with stolen goods within