And I do not believe it, for this reason, that the earliest form of the word with us was, and the commoner now in the inland parts still is, so far as I can discover, raredone.  Golding has ‘egs reere-rosted,’ which, whatever else it mean, cannot mean raw-roasted, I find rather as a monosyllable in Donne, and still better, as giving the sound, rhyming with fair in Warner.  There is an epigram of Sir Thomas Browne in which the words rather than make a monosyllable;—­

  ’What furie is’t to take Death’s part
  And rather than by Nature, die by Art!’

The contraction more’n I find in the old play ‘Fuimus Troes,’ in a verse where the measure is so strongly accented as to leave it beyond doubt,—­

  ’A golden crown whose heirs
  More than half the world subdue.’

It may be, however, that the contraction is in ‘th’orld.’  It is unmistakable in the ’Second Maiden’s Tragedy:’—­

                ’It were but folly,
  Dear soul, to boast of more than I can perform.’

Is our gin for given more violent than mar’l for marvel, which was once common, and which I find as late as Herrick?  Nay, Herrick has gin (spelling it gen), too, as do the Scotch, who agree with us likewise in preferring chimly to chimney.

I will now leave pronunciation and turn to words or phrases which have been supposed peculiar to us, only pausing to pick up a single dropped stitch, in the pronunciation of the word supreme, which I had thought native till I found it in the well-languaged Daniel.  I will begin with a word of which I have never met with any example in any English writer of authority.  We express the first stage of withering in a green plant suddenly cut down by the verb to wilt.  It is, of course, own cousin of the German welken, but I have never come upon it in literary use, and my own books of reference give me faint help.  Graff gives welhen, marcescere, and refers to weih (weak), and conjecturally to A.-S, hvelan.  The A.-S. wealwian (to wither) is nearer, but not so near as two words in the Icelandic, which perhaps put us on the track of its ancestry,—­velgi, tepefacere, (and velki, with the derivative) meaning contaminare. Wilt, at any rate, is a good word, filling, as it does, a sensible gap between drooping and withering, and the imaginative phrase ‘he wilted right down,’ like ‘he caved right in,’ is a true Americanism. Wilt occurs in English provincial glossaries, but is explained by wither, which with us it does not mean.  We have a few words such as cache, cohog, carry (portage), shoot (chute), timber (forest), bushwhack (to pull a boat along by the bushes on the edge of a stream), buckeye