by a curious arrangement of districts in Massachusetts, to transfer the balance of power to his own party.  One of his opponents, poring over the map of the Commonwealth, was struck by the odd look of the geographical lines which thus were drawn, curving in and out among the towns and counties.  “It looks,” said he, “like a Salamander.”  “Looks like a Gerry-mander!” ejaculated another; and the term stuck long and closely.

Now and then you have the aristocratic and democratic sides of an idea in use at the same time.  Those who style themselves “Gentlemen of the Press” are known to the rest of mankind as “Dead Heads,”—­being, for paying purposes, literally, capita mortua.

So, too, our colleges are provided, over and above the various dead languages of their classic curriculum, with the two tongues.  The one serves the young gentlemen, especially in their Sophomoric maturity, with appropriate expressions for their literary exercises and public flights.  The other is for their common talk, tells who “flunked” and was “deaded,” who “fished” with the tutor, who “cut” prayers, and who was “digging” at home.  Each college, from imperial Harvard and lordly Yale to the freshest Western “Institution,” whose three professors fondly cultivate the same number of aspiring Alumni, has its particular dialect with its quadrennial changes.  The just budded Freshmen of the class of ’64 could hardly without help decipher “The Rebelliad,” which in the Consulship of Plancus Kirkland was the epic of the day.  The good old gentlemen who come up to eat Commencement dinners and to sing with quavery voices the annual psalm thereafter, are bewildered in the mazes of the college-speech of their grandsons.  Whence come these phrases few can tell.  Like witty Dr. S------’s “quotation,” which never was anything else, they started in life as sayings, springing full-grown, like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister.  Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys continue as in our day to “create a shout,” instead of “making a call,” upon their lady acquaintances,—­if they still use “ponies,”—­if they “group,” and get, as we did, “parietals” and “publics” for the same.

The police courts contribute their quota.  Baggage-smashing, dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patent-safe men, the confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves’ Latin and are known of men.

Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it cannot quite keep to itself.  We hear in the religious world of “professors,” and “monthly concerts,” (which mean praying, and not psalmody,) of “sensation-preaching,” (which takes the place of the “painful” preaching of old times,) of “platform-speakers,” of “revival-preachers,” of “broad pulpits,” and “Churches of the Future,”