VILLAGE MINERS. 149 



clothes, tearing a jagged hole in the coat. Country 

 children are always "limming" their clothes to pieces ; 

 "limm," or "limb," expresses a ragged tear. 



Kecently, fashion set the example of ladies having 

 their hair shorn as short as men. It is quite common 

 to see young ladies, the backs of whose heads are 

 polled, all the glory of hair gone, no plait, no twist, 

 but all cut close and somewhat rough. If a village 

 Californian were to see this he would say, " they got 

 their hair hogged off." " Hogged " means cut off short 

 so as to stand up like bristles. Ponies often have 

 hogs' manes; all the horses in the Grecian sculpture 

 have their manes hogged. In bitter winter weather 

 the servants in the dairies who have much to do with 

 buckets of water, and spend the morning in splashing 

 for dairies need much of that kind of thing sometimes 

 find that the drops have frozen as they walk, and dis- 

 cover that their aprons are fringed with " daglets," i.e. 

 icicles. Thatched roofs are always hung with " dag- 

 lets " in frost ; thatch holds a certain amount of mois- 

 ture, as of mist, and this drips during the day and so 

 forms stalactites of ice, often a foot or more in length. 

 " Clout " is a " dictionary word," a knock on the head, 

 but it is pronounced differently here; they say a 

 " clue " in the head. Stuttering and stammering each 

 express well-known conditions of speech, but there ic 

 another not recognized in dictionary language. If a 

 person has been made a butt of, laughed at, joked, and 

 tormented till he hesitates and fumbles as it were with 

 his words, he is said to be in a state of " hacka." 

 " Hacka " is to have to think a minute before he can 

 say what he wants to. 



