Only one other specimen (for I must hurry on helter-skelter and harum-scarum) from words beginning with H—­to be, or cause others to be, on the hig, that is, to go about, or cause others to go about, in a fume, angrily excited, menacing revenge.  “Betty,” I asked one of my parishioners, “why do you make these ill-natured, irritating speeches to your next-door neighbour?” “Oh, bless yer,” was the reply I received, “I only said ’em just to set old Sally on the hig.”  She knew that not to many was it given to hear resignedly the bitter word, that not to many was given in its reality the resignation affected by another of my old women, who (one of those wretched combinations of religion and rancour, “who think they’re pious when they’re only bilious”) accosted me with the startling intelligence—­“Oh, Mestur ’Ole, I’ve got another lift towards ’eaven.  Bowcocks” (tenants of the cottage adjoining her own), “Bowcocks has been telling more lies; blessed are the parsecuted!” Better open war than this dismal affectation of peace!  Better to confess ourselves hity-tity, and to raise a hullabaloo, than such humbug as this!

I, the egotist, has for once nothing to say; but J recalls to me an extract from a conversation which took place during one of my parochial visitations.

Pastor.—­“Did I not see old Nanny Smith talking with you at your door just now?”

Parishioner.—­“Oh yes, she wor’ here not three minutes sin’, and jabbering, as usual, like a clamm’d [famished] jay in a wood; but when she see your reverence coming up th’ lane, th’ old lass wor’ gone in a jiffey.”

K makes no suggestions, and L but few.  “I’ll lay,” has no reference to eggs or to a recumbent posture, but implies a wager.  Some years ago, I was riding to the meet, and came up inaudibly, upon the wayside grass, with two grooms on their masters’ hunters, peering over their pummels at a mounted horse in the distance before them and anxiously discussing his identity.  Just as I was passing the disputants, the one turned to the other and said, “I shall lay yer three threepenny gins to one as it’s Colonel’s rat-tailed ’oss.”

Lig is still commonly used for “lie.”  “Our Bob has ligabed sin’ Monday.”  “The moon wor ligging behind a cloud, so they couldn’t see keepers coming.”  To lorp is to move awkwardly or idly, and the word suggests a noble line for the alliterative poet: 

  Lo, lazy lubbers loutish, lorp and loll.

In the days of my boyhood I was perplexed conjecturing by what process of the rustic mind moles had changed their names into Mouldi-warps; but I have since discovered that in this instance, as in countless others, the bucolic brain was not so mollified by beans and bacon as some would have us believe.  The mould—­and very fine mould it is—­is warped, turned up by the mole; and this reminds me of a mole-catcher, whose principles were warped also, and whose occupation was gone awhile in our parts, when it was discovered that he carried a collection of dead moles about with him, with which, the morning after his traps had been set, he made a grand display on some contiguous hedge, inducing his employer fondly to imagine that his enemies (as he thought of them) had been all destroyed in a night.