what do you mean by holding up your train?” It was folly for the doctor to ask an other person, as if an other could guess her meaning better than he.  The text with the possessive is therefore not to be corrected by inserting a hyphen and an of, after Murray’s doctrine before cited; as, “What is the meaning of this lady’s holding-up of her train?” Murray did well to reject this example, but as a specimen of English, his own is no better.  The question which he asks, ought to have been, “Why did this person dismiss his servant so hastily?” Fisk has it in the following form:  “What is the reason of this person’s dismissing his servant so hastily?”—­English Grammar Simplified, p. 108.  This amender of grammars omits the of which Murray and others scrupulously insert to govern the noun servant, and boldly avows at once, what their rule implies, that, “Participles are sometimes used both as verbs and as nouns at the same time; as, ‘By the mind’s changing the object,’ &c.”—­Ib., p. 134; so Emmons’s Gram., p. 64.  But he errs as much as they, and contradicts both himself and them.  For one ought rather to say, “By the mind’s changing of the object;” else changing, which “does the office of a noun,” has not truly “a correspondent regimen.”  Yet of is useless after dismissing, unless we take away the adverb by which the participle is prevented from becoming a noun.  “Dismissing of his servant so hastily,” is in itself an ungrammatical phrase; and nothing but to omit either the preposition, or the two adverbs, can possibly make it right.  Without the latter, it may follow the possessive; but without the former, our most approved grammars say it cannot.  Some critics, however, object to the of, because the dismissing is not the servant’s act; but this, as I shall hereafter show, is no valid objection:  they stickle for a false rule.

OBS. 15.—­Thus these authors, differing from one an other as they do, and each contradicting himself and some of the rest, are, as it would seem, all wrong in respect to the whole matter at issue.  For whether the phrase in question be like Priestley’s, or like Murray’s, or like Fisk’s, it is still, according to the best authorities, unfit to govern the possessive case; because, in stead of being a substantive, it is something more than a participle, and yet they take it substantively.  They form this phrase in many different fashions, and yet each man of them pretends that what he approves, is just like the construction of a regular noun:  “Just as we say, ’What is the reason of this person’s hasty dismission of his servant.’”—­Murray, Fisk, and others.  “Just as we say, ’What is the meaning of this lady’s dress,’ &c.”—­Priestley.  The meaning of a lady’s dress, forsooth!  The illustration is worthy of the doctrine taught. “An