taken either way, are not good English, must be obvious to every intelligent reader. An, as I apprehend, is here a mere prefix, which has somehow been mistaken in form, and erroneously disjoined from the following word.  If so, the correction ought to be made after the fashion of the following passage from Bishop M’Ilvaine:  “On a certain occasion, our Saviour was followed by five thousand men, into a desert place, where they were enhungered.”—­Lectures on Christianity, p. 210.

OBS. 21.—­The word a, when it does not denote one thing of a kind, is not an article, but a genuine preposition; being probably the same as the French a, signifying to, at, on, in, or of:  as, “Who hath it?  He that died a Wednesday.”—­Shak.  That is, on Wednesday.  So sometimes before plurals; as, “He carves a Sundays.”—­Swift.  That is, on Sundays.  “He is let out a nights.”—­Id. That is, on nights—­like the following example:  “A pack of rascals that walk the streets on nights.”—­Id. “He will knap the spears a pieces with his teeth.”—­More’s Antid. That is, in pieces, or to pieces.  So in the compound word now-a-days, where it means on; and in the proper names, Thomas a Becket, Thomas a Kempis, Anthony a Wood, where it means at or of.

   “Bot certainly the daisit blude now on dayis
    Waxis dolf and dull throw myne unwieldy age.”—­Douglas.

OBS. 22.—­As a preposition, a has now most generally become a prefix, or what the grammarians call an inseparable preposition; as in abed, in bed; aboard, on board; abroad, at large; afire, on fire; afore, in front; afoul, in contact; aloft, on high; aloud, with loudness; amain, at main strength; amidst, in the midst; akin, of kin; ajar, unfastened; ahead, onward; afield, to the field; alee, to the leeward; anew, of new, with renewal. “A-nights, he was in the practice of sleeping, &c.; but a-days he kept looking on the barren ocean, shedding tears.”—­Dr. Murray’s Hist. of Europ.  Lang., Vol. ii, p. 162.  Compounds of this kind, in most instances, follow verbs, and are consequently reckoned adverbs; as, To go astray,—­To turn aside,—­To soar aloft,—­To fall asleep.  But sometimes the antecedent term is a noun or a pronoun, and then they are as clearly adjectives; as, “Imagination is like to work better upon sleeping men, than men awake.”—­Lord Bacon. “Man alive, did you ever make a hornet afraid, or catch a weasel asleep?” And sometimes the compound governs a noun or a pronoun after it, and then it is a preposition; as, “A bridge is laid across a river.”—­Webster’s Dict., “To break his bridge athwart the Hellespont.”—­Bacon’s Essays.