At the present moment (July 25th) the whole surface of the water is covered with leaves so large and fresh and beautiful that these alone would compensate for all the trouble taken. The leaves are quite as large, many of them, as the largest seen in the wild state, and among them are two superbly perfect lilies, and several more struggling up to the light. For the winter I shall cover the tub with boards and a thick layer of straw, which will keep the water from freezing much below the surface, and, I trust, preserve the precious roots at the bottom.
A little visitor from Philadelphia, whose grand passion is collecting turtles, lizards, frogs, etc., has added five small frogs to the tub. At any time one or more of them may be seen enthroned on a large leaf, while at night callers sitting on the veranda hear the gentle croaking and are greatly puzzled to account for it.
M. H.
A NEGLECTED BRANCH OF PHILOLOGY.
Slang must be coeval with the race. That part of the race which delights in and creates it must have always existed. It is found in the oldest light literature we possess, and in some of the gravest. It abounds in the Greek plays, not being limited to those of them which avowedly "Aristophanize." We can imagine the gamins of Israel echoing and embellishing the "chaff" launched by Elijah at the discomfited priests of Baal. Miriam comes as close to it as a lady may in her exultations over the drenched Egyptians. Terence is full of it, and the graffiti exhumed in Italy further enlighten us as to the deadest portion of one of the dead languages.
Slang is one form of popular poetry. It will maintain its existence, in ever-fleeting shapes, so long as the mind of the masses has a poetic side, and will particularly flourish wherever circumstances favor the combination, in the ideas of the masses, of the grotesque and the novel with the imaginative. In this country, the West—and California, the farthest border of the West—is the hotbed of slang. A Western writer "spreads himself" at the expense of a rival who "welters" in "gush" or "slops over" too profusely. His darling aim is to get his own "head level" and to send his opponent off "on his ear." Of some of the phrases of this kind the origin is difficult to trace, and generally not worth tracing. Others are markedly metaphorical fittings of words with new meanings, and often highly expressive meanings. They are efforts of fancy not conveyed in metre, nor even in prose, but condensed into a single word or phrase. They thus become portable enough to run like lightning from tongue to tongue and pen to pen over a continent. But, like other electric flashes, they are not usually of long duration. If quickly started, they are as quickly forgotten. Each generation or decade or year manufactures its own supply of slang words, and seldom bequeaths any of them as a permanent inheritance. Delineators of rude or low life, like the littérateurs of the Pacific coast school, Dickens and Thackeray, embed in their writings the slang of their day; but it stays there, recommended though it may be by the brilliancy of its setting, and rarely passes into currency outside of their pages. Its flavor is usually too local and fugitive for that.
As slang blends in one direction with genuine poetry, in another it sinks into the base jargon invented by evil-doers for the disguise of their intercourse and concealment of their purposes. Of the latter description are the dialects of the prize-ring and the fraternity of thieves. These are rich and copious, and often ingenious, like the other devices of their originators. How far the gypsy language may be included with them it is impossible to say; but it has been largely borrowed from by them, thanks either to community of objects, and consequent sympathy of feelings, or to its obscurity and shapelessness, and the utter ignorance of it among the intelligent and plunderable classes.
These classes have a slang of their own too; and some of it gets established in the language. Broadly speaking, all foreign words which are adopted from affectation, and not from the growing necessities of science and thought, may be ranked as slang. That they should occasionally effect a lodgment it is not at all indispensable that they should impart a new idea. Very often they merely elbow out an old member of the vernacular conveying precisely the same meaning. It would be easy to cite such cases, and to point to naturalized foreigners, now unnoticed in every-day intercourse, but at their first appearance conspicuous enough in fashionable slang. Scores of them have been introduced to us by the milliner and the tailor. Vouched for by such august authority, they are of course elegant. But they are nothing more. More solid merit than theirs, in the eyes of the student of language, belongs to the humbler products of the popular fancy—words more pointed, more pithy and more graphic, but more fleeting.
ANOTHER DEFUNCT MONOPOLY.
The patent on sewing-machines has passed into limbo with the patent on the revolver and the steam-engine and the patent on gunpowder, if Friar Bacon ever entered his caveat, paid his fee, fought the pirates through the courts and took one out—a point on which history, which chronicles the minutest military or judicial homicide and the most contemptible court-intrigue of his day, forgets to inform us. His last possible renewal, however, would have in any case died out long ago, and left his valuable contribution to human happiness as common property as the contrivance of the blind, bedevilled, rich and unhappy originator of the sewing-machine.