(a picturesque word for the horse-chestnut); but how many can we be said to have fairly brought into the language, as Alexander Gill, who first mentions Americanisms, meant it when he said, ’Sed et ab Americanis nonnulla mutuamur ut MAIZ et CANOA’?  Very few, I suspect, and those mostly by borrowing from the French, German, Spanish, or Indian.[28] ‘The Dipper,’ for the ’Great Bear,’ strikes me as having a native air. Bogus, in the sense of worthless, is undoubtedly ours, but is, I more than suspect, a corruption of the French bagasse (from low Latin bagasea), which travelled up the Mississippi from New Orleans, where it was used for the refuse of the sugar-cane.  It is true, we have modified the meaning of some words.  We use freshet in the sense of flood, for which I have not chanced upon any authority.  Our New England cross between Ancient Pistol and Dugald Dalgetty, Captain Underhill, uses the word (1638) to mean a current, and I do not recollect it elsewhere in that sense.  I therefore leave it with a? for future explorers. Crick for creek I find in Captain John Smith and in the dedication of Fuller’s ’Holy Warre,’ and run, meaning a small stream, in Waymouth’s ‘Voyage’ (1605). Humans for men, which Mr. Bartlett includes in his ‘Dictionary of Americanisms,’ is Chapman’s habitual phrase in his translation of Homer.  I find it also in the old play of ’The Hog hath lost his Pearl.’ Dogs for andirons is still current in New England, and in Walter de Biblesworth I find chiens glossed in the margin by andirons. Gunning for shooting is in Drayton.  We once got credit for the poetical word fall for autumn, but Mr. Bartlett and the last edition of Webster’s Dictionary refer us to Dryden.  It is even older, for I find it in Drayton, and Bishop Hall has autumn fall.  Middleton plays upon the word:  ’May’st thou have a reasonable good spring, for thou art like to have many dangerous foul falls.’  Daniel does the same, and Coleridge uses it as we do.  Gray uses the archaism picked for peaked, and the word smudge (as our backwoodsmen do) for a smothered fire.  Lord Herbert of Cherbury (more properly perhaps than even Sidney, the last preux chevalier) has ‘the Emperor’s folks’ just as a Yankee would say it. Loan for lend, with which we have hitherto been blackened, I must retort upon the mother island, for it appears so long ago as in ‘Albion’s England.’ Fleshy, in the sense of stout, may claim Ben Jonson’s warrant, and I find it also so lately as in Francklin’s ‘Lucian.’ Chore is also Jonson’s word, and I am inclined to prefer it to chare and char, because I think that I see a more natural origin for it in the French jour—­whence it might come to mean a day’s work, and thence a job—­than anywhere else.[29] At onst for at once