42 SPRING-TIDE. 



rod. He is an old and cunning fish, and 

 is not to be easily caught. 



Simon. The best woy to catch he is to 

 drow a leetle bit aboove, and let the v]y 

 zail auver bin. 



J. That last word of our friend's puzzles 

 me a little ; is it a corruption of him or 

 it? 



S. It is no corruption, but the pure Sax- 

 on pronoun hj/n ; though, strange to say, 

 the editors of our provincial glossaries have 

 not remarked it, a proof, one may easily 

 perceive, that they have but a very slight 

 acquaintance with the dialects they have 

 undertaken to illustrate. The compilers of 

 some of these works are greatly deceived 

 if they suppose any English dialect is to 

 be illustrated by merely turning over the 

 leaves of an Anglo-Saxon dictionary. Others 

 err as much in concluding, that, as a cer- 

 tain provincial word is not to be discovered 

 in these vocabularies, it is necessarily not 



