our_s_, and the rest mine. His does not alter in popular use.  Hence the reason why you hear it so often, in common conversation, when standing without the noun expressed, pronounced as if written hisen.  The word other, and some others, come under the same remark.  When the nouns specified are expressed, they take the regular termination; as, give me these Baldwin apples, and a few others—­a few other apples.

* * * * *

There is a class of small words which from the frequency of their use have, like pronouns, lost their primitive character, and are now preserved only as adjectives.  Let us examine a few of them by endeavoring to ferret out their true meaning and application in the expression of ideas.  We will begin with the old articles, a, an, and the, by testing the truth and propriety of the duty commonly assigned to them in our grammars.

The standard grammar asserts that “an article is a word prefixed to substantives, to point them out, and to show how far their signification extends; as, “a garden, an eagle, the woman.”  Skepticism in grammar is no crime, so we will not hesitate to call in question the correctness of this “best of all grammars beyond all comparison.”  Let us consider the very examples given.  They were doubtless the best that could be found.  Does a “point out” the garden, or “show how far its signification extends?” It does neither of these things.  It may name “any” garden, and it certainly does not define whether it is a great or a small one.  It simply determines that one garden is the subject of remark.  All else is to be determined by the word garden.

We are told there are two articles, the one indefinite, the other definite—­a is the former, and the the latter.  I shall leave it with you to reconcile the apparent contradiction of an indefinite article which “is used in a vague sense, to point out the signification of another word.”  But I challenge teachers to make their pupils comprehend such a jargon, if they can do it themselves.  But it is as good sense as we find in many of the popular grammars of the day.

Again, Murray says “a becomes an before a vowel or silent h;” and so say all his simplifying satellites after him.  Is such the fact?  Is he right?  He is, I most unqualifiedly admit, with this little correction, the addition of a single word—­he is right wrong!  Instead of a becoming an, the reverse is the fact.  The word is derived directly from the same word which still stands as our first numeral.  It was a short time since written ane, as any one may see by consulting all old books.  By and by it dropped the e, and afterwards, for the sake of euphony, in certain cases, the n, so that now it stands a single letter.  You all have lived long enough to have noticed the