74 NATURAL HISTORY AND TOPOGRAPHY OF GROTON, MASS. 



THE SURVIVAL OF SOME OLD WORDS. 



MORE than thirty years ago I copied and printed " The 

 Early Records of Groton " ; and I was interested to find cer- 

 tain words in the original manuscript that have practically 

 disappeared from the language, and in fact have died a 

 natural death. One such word is causey for causeway, which 

 occurs twice on page 36 of the printed book. While its 

 meaning is clear, I have been waiting patiently to hear some 

 one use the word in order to show that it has been kept alive 

 somewhere. Much to my delight a few years ago I heard a 

 man with whom I was driving use it, as he pointed to a 

 causeway on a low piece of ground in a field near by. The 

 man was of Groton ancestry for many generations, and was 

 accustomed to homespun speech. I was more than pleased 

 to hear the word ; and at my request he repeated it and told 

 me what it meant, when he expressed some surprise that I 

 had never heard it. Under date of September 28, 1 7 1 7, 

 Chief-Justice Sewall, in his Diary (III. 141), speaks of 

 mending " the causey." 



Later I found that causey was used in the earlier editions of 

 King James's version of the Bible, where it occurs in 1 Chron- 

 icles xxvi. 16, 18, and afterward translated as causeway. 

 While the Bible has proved to be the source of great wisdom 

 in matters of religious thought, in many ways it has also 

 been of much service to philological students. 



When I was a boy, I remember hearing certain old persons 

 who always said housen for houses, but I have not now heard 

 the expression for perhaps fifty years. A few centuries ago 

 it probably was a plural in good usage, as the word oxen 

 with a similar termination is to-day. It is always interest- 

 ing to note the changes in ordinary speech which take place 

 from time to time. Many years ago, certainly forty, James 

 Russell Lowell once told me at Bar Harbor that for a long 

 time he was on the lookout for the word b/owth, meaning 

 blossoms. Finally on one occasion in the spring of the year 

 he was driving with a countryman, when he was much pleased 



