men among us is fuller of metaphor and of phrases that suggest lively images than that of any other people I have seen.  Very many such will be found in Mr. Bartlett’s book, though his short list of proverbs at the end seem to me, with one or two exceptions, as un-American as possible.  Most of them have no character at all but coarseness, and are quite too long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always ’takes off its coat to it,’ as a Yankee would say.  There are plenty that have a more native and puckery flavor, seedlings from the old stock often, and yet new varieties.  One hears such not seldom among us Easterners, and the West would yield many more.  ’Mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog;’ ’Cold as the north side of a Jenooary gravestone by starlight;’ ‘Hungry as a graven image;’ ’Pop’lar as a hen with one chicken;’ ‘A hen’s time ain’t much;’ ’Quicker ‘n greased lightnin’;’ ‘Ther’s sech a thing ez bein’ tu’ (our Yankee paraphrase of [Greek:  maeden agan]); hence the phrase tooin’ round, meaning a supererogatory activity like that of flies; ’Stingy enough to skim his milk at both eends;’ ‘Hot as the Devil’s kitchen;’ ‘Handy as a pocket in a shirt;’ ‘He’s a whole team and the dog under the wagon;’ ’All deacons are good, but there’s odds in deacons’ (to deacon berries is to put the largest atop); ’So thievish they hev to take in their stone walls nights;’[32] may serve as specimens.  ‘I take my tea barfoot,’ said a backwoodsman when asked if he would have cream and sugar. (I find barfoot, by the way, in the Coventry Plays.) A man speaking to me once of a very rocky clearing said, ‘Stone’s got a pretty heavy mortgage on that land,’ and I overheard a guide in the woods say to his companions who were urging him to sing, ‘Wal, I did sing once, but toons gut invented, an’ thet spilt my trade.’  Whoever has driven over a stream by a bridge made of slabs will feel the picturesque force of the epithet slab-bridged applied to a fellow of shaky character.  Almost every county has some good die-sinker in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the whole neighborhood.  Such a one described the county jail (the one stone building where all the dwellings are of wood) as ’the house whose underpinnin’ come up to the eaves,’ and called hell ’the place where they didn’t rake up their fires nights.’  I once asked a stage-driver if the other side of a hill were as steep as the one we were climbing:  ‘Steep? chain lightnin’ couldn’ go down it ‘thout puttin’ the shoe on!’ And this brings me back to the exaggeration of which I spoke before.  To me there is something very taking in the negro ’so black that charcoal made a chalk-mark on him,’ and the wooden shingle ’painted so like marble that it sank in water,’ as if its very consciousness or its vanity had been overpersuaded by the cunning of the painter.  I heard a man, in order to give a notion of some very cold weather, say to another that a certain Joe, who had been taking