d[)a]nger (though the latter had certainly begun to take its present sound so early as 1636, when I find it sometimes spelt dainger).  But in general it may be said that nothing can be found in it which does not still survive in some one or other of the English provincial dialects.  There is, perhaps, a single exception in the verb to sleeve.  To sleeve silk means to divide or ravel out a thread of silk with the point of a needle till it becomes floss. (A.S. slefan, to cleave=divide.) This, I think, explains the ‘sleeveless errand’ in ‘Troilus and Cressida’ so inadequately, sometimes so ludicrously darkened by the commentators.  Is not a ‘sleeveless errand’ one that cannot be unravelled, incomprehensible, and therefore bootless?

I am not speaking now of Americanisms properly so called, that is, of words or phrases which have grown into use here either through necessity, invention, or accident, such as a carry, a one-horse affair, a prairie, to vamose.  Even these are fewer than is sometimes taken for granted.  But I think some fair defence may be made against the charge of vulgarity.  Properly speaking, vulgarity is in the thought, and not in the word or the way of pronouncing it.  Modern French, the most polite of languages, is barbarously vulgar if compared with the Latin out of which it has been corrupted, or even with Italian.  There is a wider gap, and one implying greater boorishness, between ministerium and metier, or sapiens and sachant, than between druv and drove or agin and against, which last is plainly an arrant superlative.  Our rustic coverlid is nearer its French original than the diminutive cover_let_, into which it has been ignorantly corrupted in politer speech.  I obtained from three cultivated Englishmen at different times three diverse pronunciations of a single word,—­cowcumber, coocumber, and cucumber.  Of these the first, which is Yankee also, comes nearest to the nasality of concombre.  Lord Ossory assures us that Voltaire saw the best society in England, and Voltaire tells his countrymen that handkerchief was pronounced hankercher.  I find it so spelt in Hakluyt and elsewhere.  This enormity the Yankee still persists in, and as there is always a reason for such deviations from the sound as represented by the spelling, may we not suspect two sources of derivation, and find an ancestor for kercher in couverture rather than in couvrechef?  And what greater phonetic vagary (which Dryden, by the way, called fegary) in our lingua rustica than this ker for couvre?  I copy from the fly-leaves of my books, where I have noted them from time to time, a few examples of pronunciation and phrase which will show that the Yankee often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side.  My list might be largely increased by referring to glossaries, but to them eyery one can go for himself, and I have gathered enough for my purpose.