第15章

But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.

The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.He stabbed a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it as if it ought to shriek.It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.

--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.Every language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is enshrined.Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?

Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care of themselves.--A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your hand as naked as a peeled apple.Well, he began with taking off the case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.All right except one thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the balance-wheel.So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ! and the watch had done up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time! --The English language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as so many other dialects have done before it.I can't stand this meddling any better than you, Sir.But we have a great deal to be proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we must n't be ungrateful.Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities, colleges, and especially of publishers.After all, it is likely that the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and dictionary-making.You may spade up the ocean as much as you like, and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead the tides, and the winds will form their surface.

--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the divinity-student.

Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from making a little movement on its own account.

It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown colt.Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps, better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his earlier ways of life.Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their dying hours.Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.That is one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled them with.

--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as sitting at the right upper corner of the table.

I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly intonations arrested me.The voice was youthful, but full of character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in the matter of voice.--Hear this.

Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.She overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken with the tones of her voice.Nothing would satisfy her but she must have that little girl come and live in her father's house.So the child came, being then nine years old.Until her marriage she remained under the same roof with the young lady.Her children became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing, one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes her peaceful days.--Three generations linked together by so light a breath of accident!

I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when Icame to observe him a little more closely.His complexion had something better than ,the bloom and freshness which had first attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of wholesome, lusty life.A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be: