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ascent, as you have it in C/ewghside—and many others too numerous 
toname. But not less clearly have the Danes, too, left their mark 
behind them here. Whenever you find—instead of the om, or 
town, I just now mentioned—whenever you find dy, or dye, you 
know that there the Dane has been. And so to them, too, are 
due some of the most distinctive words in our common dialect— 
such words as fe// and 77g, for a hill; wath fora ford; and hope for 
avalley, scaur or scar, dale. When you use bairn for child ; when 
they say they will gaz a person in the sense of make him do it; when 
they speak of fremd folk, of a dyke, of a gowk, of a kirn, of a midden, 
of a sark, of a ned, of reek*—in all these they are using words we owe 
to our Danish forefathers, who landed and settled in this district a 
thousand years ago, and seemed likely at one moment to destroy 
even the little of Christianity and civilization to which we had then 
attained. Sometimes in the name of a place you have two 
languages—the traces of two different possessors combined. The 
second comer finding a place already named, added to it from 
his own dialect some further name appropriate to the locality. 
Springkell, for instance, is such a case—for 4e// is merely Danish for 
a spring. Scarbank is possibly another. In Dormanstead, both 
man and stead mean place—the one Old British, the other Anglo 
Saxon. Some think that among the different peoples, which have 
thus in succession settled here, it is to the Danes more than the 
others that we owe that poetic taste and skill, which have found 
their outlet in the Border Ballads. But I don’t know why we 
should assign their origin to one race rather than another. In 
every early race there is a tendency found more or less among 
them all, to throw into a rhythmic form that clings more easily to 
the memory, the stirring events of a restless and adventurous life, 
and that vividness—that intense reality—that graphic force we 
admire and love in them, is due to the conditions under which 
their authors lived—the conditions of an age when every man felt 
from day to day that his life was in his harid—when he waged a 
continual struggle with the powers of Nature or the craft of man 
* These are taken from a long list given by Professor Veitch, in the work 
already referred to. 
