Was all the effort he could use.
You brought the ewe back, by-and-bye,
And only begged the hewer’s ewer,
Your hands to wash in water pure,
Lest nice-nosed ladies, not a few,
Should cry, on coming near you, ‘Ugh!’”
The absurdity of that Indian grunt in our language, “ugh,” is shown in the following:
Hugh Gough, of Boroughbridge, was a rough soldier on furlough, but a man of doughty deeds in war, though before he fought for this country he was a thorough dough-faced ploughman. His horse having been houghed in an engagement with the enemy, Hugh was taken prisoner, and, I ought to add, was kept on a short enough clough of food, and suffered from drought as well as from hunger. Having, on his return home, drank too large a draught of usquebaugh, he became intoxicated, and was laughing, coughing, and hiccoughing by a trough, against which he sought to steady himself. There he was accosted by another rough, who showed him a chough which he had caught on a clough near, also the slough of a snake, which he held at the end of a tough bough of eugh-tree, and which his shaggy shough had found and had brought to him from the entrance to a sough which ran through and drained a slough that was close to a lough in the neighborhood.
A Spelling Lesson
The most skilful gauger we ever knew was a maligned cobbler, armed with a poniard, who drove a pedler’s wagon, using a mullein-stalk as an instrument of coercion, to tyrannize over his pony shod with calks. He was a Galilean Sadducee, and he had a phthisicky catarrh, diphtheria, and the bilious intermittent erysipelas. A certain Sibyl, with the sobriquet of “Gypsy,” went into ecstasies of cachinnation at seeing him measure a bushel of peas; and separate saccharine tomatoes from a heap of peeled potatoes, without dyeing or singeing the ignitible queue which he wore, or becoming paralyzed with a hemorrhage. Lifting her eyes to the ceiling of the cupola of the Capitol to conceal her unparalleled embarrassment, making a rough courtesy, and not harassing him with mystifying, rarefying, and stupefying innuendoes, she gave him a couch, a bouquet of lilies, mignonette, and fuchsias, a treatise on mnemonics, a copy of the Apocrypha in hieroglyphics, daguerreotypes of Mendelssohn and Kosciusko, a kaleidoscope, a dramphial of ipecacuanha, a teaspoonful of naphtha, for deleble purposes, a ferrule, a clarionet, some licorice, a surcingle, a carnelian of symmetrical proportions, a chronometer with a movable balance-wheel, a box of dominoes, and a catechism. The gauger, who was also a trafficking rectifier and a parishioner of a distinguished ecclesiastic, preferring a woollen surtout (his choice was referable to a vacillating occasionally occurring idiosyncrasy), wofully uttered this apothegm: “Life is checkered; but schism, apostasy, heresy, and villany shall be punished.” The Sibyl apologizingly answered, “There is a ratable and allegeable difference between a conferrable ellipsis and a trisyllabic diæresis.” We replied in trochees, not impugning her suspicion.