Before leaving the subject, I will add a few comments made from time to time on the margin of Mr. Bartlett’s excellent ‘Dictionary,’ to which I am glad thus publicly to acknowledge my many obligations.  ‘Avails’ is good old English, and the vails of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s porter are famous.  Averse from, averse to, and in connection with them the English vulgarism ‘different to;’ the corrupt use of to in these cases, as well as in the Yankee ‘he lives to Salem,’ ‘to home,’ and others, must be a very old one, for in the one case it plainly arose from confounding the two French prepositions a, (from Latin ad and ab), and in the other from translating the first of them.  I once thought ‘different to’ a modern vulgarism, and Mr. Thackeray, on my pointing it out to him in ‘Henry Esmond,’ confessed it to be an anachronism.  Mr. Bartlett refers to ’the old writers quoted in Richardson’s Dictionary’ for ‘different to,’ though in my edition of that work all the examples are with from.  But I find to used invariably by Sir R. Hawkins in Hakluyt. Banjo is a negro corruption of O.E. bandore. Bind-weed can hardly be modern, for wood-bind is old and radically right, intertwining itself through bindan and windan with classic stems. Bobolink:  is this a contraction for Bob o’ Lincoln?  I find bobolynes, in one of the poems attributed to Skelton, where it may be rendered giddy-pate, a term very fit for the bird in his ecstasies. Cruel for great is in Hakluyt. Bowling-alley is in Nash’s ‘Pierce Pennilesse.’ Curious, meaning nice, occurs continually in old writers, and is as old as Pecock’s ‘Repressor.’ Droger is O.E. drugger. Educational is in Burke. Feeze is only a form of fizz. To fix, in the American sense, I find used by the Commissioners of the United Colonies so early as 1675, ‘their arms well fixed and fit for service.’ To take the foot in the hand is German; so is to go under. Gundalow is old; I find gundelo in Hakluyt, and gundello in Booth’s reprint of the folio Shakespeare of 1623. Gonoff is O.E. gnoffe. Heap is in ’Piers Ploughman’ (’and other names an heep’), and in Hakluyt (’seeing such a heap of their enemies ready to devour them’). To liquor is in the ‘Puritan’ (’call ’em in, and liquor ’em a little’). To loaf:  this, I think, is unquestionably German. Laufen is pronounced lofen in some parts of Germany, and I once heard one German student say to another, Ich lauf (lofe) hier bis du wiederkehrest, and he began accordingly to saunter up and down, in short, to loaf. To mull, Mr. Bartlett says, means ‘to soften, to dispirit,’ and quotes from ’Margaret,’—­’There has been a pretty considerable mullin going on among the doctors,’—­where it surely