Flying onwards—­for this is a very fugitive piece—­I would ask admiration for the adjective muggy, as exquisitely descriptive of weather, not uncommon in this climate, where a fog gives one the idea, suggested by Dickens, that nature is brewing on an extensive scale outside, and there’s dampness everywhere, taking the curl from ringlet and whisker, and causing our adhesive envelopes to fasten themselves on our writing-table, as though practising the duties of their post.

          No sun, no moon,
          No morn, no noon,
  No dawn, no dusk, no proper time of day—­
        No sky, no earthly view,
        No distance looking blue. 
  No road, no street, no t’other side the way—­
    No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
      No comfortable feel in any member,
    No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
          No ... vember!

I love, though not as licensed victuallers love, the little monosyllable nip.  What a nimble agility, what a motive power, in that curt, imperative word!—­the pistol-shot which starts the boat-race, the brief, shrill whistle which starts the train.  “Just nip off your horse and pull out that stake.”  “You nipped out o’ the army,” said a snob to a friend of mine, who had retired some years before the Crimean invasion, and who, in his magisterial capacity, had offended the snob; “you know’d t’ war wor’ a-coming; you nipped out, you didn’t relish them Rooshan baggonets a-prodding and a-pricking.  You nipped out o’ th’ army; you know’d t’ war wor’ coming.  Good morning.  I think you were right.”

When the wind bloweth in from the Orient, or when our discretion has collapsed before a lobster salad (that claw looked so innocently pink, and that lettuce so crisp and green!) then is poor human nature but too prone to be querulous; we disagree, like the lobster, with our fellow creatures; we are peevishly disposed to nag.  “My mestur has been a good husband to me,” said one of the matrons of my flock, “but he can chime in nasty when he wants to nag.”

Times of refinement are probably at hand when, under the sacred influence of School Boards, the rural tongue shall cease to substitute the word no-at for nought, or nothing.  I am not sorry that when that epoch comes I shall no longer be attached to this machine.  I cling to those expressions, which I have heard from childhood:  “He’s like a no-at.” “He’s up to no-at.”  One day, years ago, we waited for the train at, not Coventry, but Ratcliffe-on-Trent, and while we waited a weary workman, with his bag of tools on his back, came and sat on the bench beside.  Presently we were joined by a third person in the garrulous phase of inebriety, and he pestered the tired artisan with his boshand gibberish (two words which should have been introduced at an earlier period of my history) until he provoked the righteous expostulation,