Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. SPELLING DOWN THE MASTER, "I "low," said Mrs. Means, as she stuffed the tobacco into her cob pipe after supper on that eventful Wednesday evening: "I "low they'll app'int the Squire to gin out the words to-night. They mos' always do, you see, kase he's the peartest1 ole man in this deestrick; and I 'low some of the young fellers would have to git up and dust ef they would keep up to him. And he uses sech remarkable smart words. He speaks so polite, too. But laws don't I remember when he was poarer nor Job's turkey? Twenty year ago, when he come to these 'ere diggin's, that air Squire Hawkins was a poar Yankee school-master, that said 'pail' instid of bucket, and that called a cow a 'caow,' and thatcouldn't tell to save his gizzard what we meant by 'low1 and by right smart.2 But he's larnt our ways 8 Peart or peert is only another form of the old word pert?probably an older form. Bartlett cites an example of peart as far back as Sir Philip Sydney; and Halliwell finds it in various English dialects. Davies, afterward president of Princeton College, describes Dr. Lardner, in 1754, as "a little pert old gent." I do not know that Dr. Davies pronounced his pert as though it were peart, but he uses it in the sense it has in the text, viz., bright-witted, intelligent. The general sense of peart is lively, either in body or mind. 1 Mr. Lowell suggested to me in 1869 that this word 'low has no kinship with allow, but is an independent word for which he gave a Low Latin original of similar sound. I have not been able to trace any such word, but Mr. Lowell had so much linguisticjcnowledge of the out-of-the-way sort that it may be worth while to record his impression. Bartlett is wrong in defining this word, as he is usually in his attempts to explain dialect outside o...