"Well, gentlemen," he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man not used to diplomacy, "how do you like your accommodations?"

Staniford silently acquiesced in Dunham's reply that they found them excellent. "But you don't mean to say," Dunham added, "that you 're going to give us beefsteak and all the vegetables of the season the whole way over?"

"No," said the captain; 66 we shall put you on sea-fare soon enough. But you'll like it. You don't want the same things at sea that you do on shore; your appetite chops round into a different quarter altogether, and you want salt beef; but you 'll get it good. Your room 's pretty snug," he suggested.

"Oh, it's big enough," said Staniford, to whom he had turned as perhaps more in authority than Dunham. "While we 're well we only sleep in it, and if we're seasick it does n't matter where we are."

The captain knocked the ash from his cigar with the tip of his fat little finger, and looked down. "I was in hopes I could have let you had a room apiece, but I had another passenger jumped on me at the last minute. I suppose you see what's the matter with Mr. Hicks?" He looked up from one to another, and they replied with a glance of perfect intelligence. "I don't generally talk my passengers over with one another, but I thought I'd better speak to you about him. I found him yesterday evening at my agents', with his father. He's just been on a spree, a regular two weeks' tear, and the old gentleman did n't know what to do with him, on shore, any longer. He thought he'd send him to sea a voyage, and see what would come of it, and he plead hard with me to take him. I didn't want to take him, but he worked away at me till I could n't say no. I argued in my own mind that he could n't get anything to drink on my ship, and that he'd behave himself well enough as long as he was sober." The captain added ruefully, "He looks worse this morning than he did last VOL. XLII. - NO. 253.

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gentleman that if he got into any trouble at Try-East, or any of the ports where we touched, he should n't set foot on my ship again. But I guess he 'll keep pretty straight. He has n't got any money, for one thing."

Staniford laughed. "He stops drinking for obvious reasons, if for no others, like Artemus Ward's destitute inebriate. Did you think only of us in deciding whether you should take him?"

The captain looked up quickly at the young men, as if touched in a sore place. "Well, there again I did n't seem to get my bearings just right. I suppose you mean the young lady?" Staniford motionlessly and silently assented. "Well, she's more of a young lady than I thought she was, when her grandfather first come down here and talked of sending her over with me. He was always speaking about his little girl, you know, and I got the idea that she was about thirteen, or eleven, may be. I thought the child might be some bother on the voyage, but thinks I, I'm used to children, and I guess I can manage. Bless your soul! when I first see her on the wharf yesterday, it most knocked me down! I never believed she was half so tall, nor half so good-looking." Staniford smiled at this expression of the captain's despair, but the captain did not join him. "Why, she was as pretty as a bird! Well, there I was. It was no time then to back out. The old man would n't understood. Besides, there was the young lady herself, and she seemed so forlorn and helpless that I kind of pitied her. I thought, What if it was one of my own girls? And I made up my mind that she should n't know from anything I said or did that she was n't just as much at home and just as much in place on my ship as she would be in my house. I suppose what made me feel easier about it, and took the queerness off some, was my having my own girls along last voyage. To be sure, it ain't quite the same thing," said the captain, interrogatively.

"Not quite," consented Staniford. "If there was two of them," said the

captain, "I don't suppose I should feel so bad about it. But thinks I, A lady's a lady the world over, and a gentleman's a gentleman." The captain looked significantly at the young men. "As for that other fellow," added Captain Jenness, "if I can't take care of him, I think I'd better stop going to sea altogether, and go into the coasting trade."

He resumed his cigar with defiance, and was about turning away when Staniford spoke. "Captain Jenness, my friend and I had been talking this little matter over just before you came up.

Will you let me say that I'm rather proud of having reasoned in much the same direction as yourself?"

This was spoken with that air which gave Staniford a peculiar distinction, and made him the despair and adoration of his friend: it endowed the subject with seriousness, and conveyed a sentiment of grave and noble sincerity. The captain held out a hand to each of the young men, crossing his wrists in what seemed a favorite fashion with him. "Good!" he cried, heartily. "I thought I knew you."

W. D. Howells.

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V.

THE interest taken by people generally, and particularly by that nondescript person usually described as the intelligent reader, in discussions about words is one of the puzzles of my life. For this interest is not in any way an indication or an accompaniment of literary taste or acquirement, or even of habits of reading, anything other than newspapers or perhaps magazines. Men and women who have never read, and never will read, the books of the writers who have made the literature of the English language the grandest, the richest, and the most varied the world has known, and to whom the real study of language is as foreign as the study of heraldry or of paleontology, will have long and acrimonious disputes among themselves about words, make bets, and call in an umpire; or they will eagerly seize upon an assertion or a suggestion in a magazine or newspaper article as an occasion of a letter to the writer, in which they give him the benefit of such knowledge as they have, or have not, upon the subject. Why this is, I have not been able to divine; but I hope none the less that any of my readers who are tempted to favor me in this way will yield, and that I may continue to receive such letters; for they are in some few cases valuable for the knowledge they impart or for the suggestions that they make. But I must once for all ask to be excused from the task of answering them, except as I may do so in these or other like pages.

I am led to these remarks by the fact that of the letters brought to me by the article on Americanisms in the September Atlantic, thirteen, including "postal-cards," were in regard to the word whisker, and particularly in regard to the Westernism "chin-whiskers." This phrase, which had escaped the minute research of Mr. Bartlett, and which I

had never heard, is, it seems, in very common use among all the Western people, beginning at the western part of New York, and is even heard, as I am assured, "in the barber shops in Boston." I think that my correspondent might better have said in some of those shops; for I am sure that I know Boston and Boston people well enough to say, without fear of contradiction, that among those who give to Boston and its neighborhood their character it is not the habit to talk of "chin-whiskers," and that my British correspondent, whose remark upon the Western habit was the occasion of what I wrote upon it, is quite right in his belief that "educated Americans apply the term [whisker] only to the hair growing upon the cheeks."

Although the term "chin-whisker " is not to be defended, and is both a solecism and, if I may be pardoned for saying so, a barberism, yet there is something to be said upon the subject which may not be without interest of its kind. Whisker, although in the English of the present and the past generations it has been confined to the hair growing uncut on the cheek, or rather the jowl, when first applied to the beard meant the mustachios. The first recorded definition of the word (in 1727) by Bailey, who preceded Johnson, is "little tufts of hair at the corners of the mouth on the upper lip." But a yet earlier use of the word in this sense, and I think the earliest in our language, is in the old proverb, "Don't leave cream within the whiskers of a cat." Now a cat's whiskers are mustachios, and nothing else. From Graymalkin, therefore, the word was transferred, perhaps by some gray mare, to her lord and master. word, I believe, is not known in our language until after the Elizabethan period, the hair on any part of a man's face being called before that time simply the beard. A whisker is truly as well as obviously (and all obvious meanings

The

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are not true) — anything that whisks or that may whisk. That appendage without which a bull is said to stand no chance in fly-time is a whisker; and so is a small broom for dusting the clothes, which hence is called a whisk-broom. Dr. Brewer, of Cambridge (England), would derive whisker from the Welsh gwisg, meaning dress, and thus make whisker mean the dress of the face. But this is fanciful, unnecessary, and at variance with the history of the word. When the fashion in England and France was to shave the whole face clean, which prevailed about one hundred and fifty years, there was one class of men that did not generally conform to it, soldiers. Many of them wore mustachios; and so confined to them was the use of this virile ornament that the appearance of it upon a man's face during that period was regarded as evidence of soldierhood, as might be shown by many passages in the literature of the time. Thus the first whiskers were worn upon the upper lip; and the word when used by writers of the latter part of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth means the mustachios. When Addison wrote "a pair of whiskers" he meant, doubtless, a pair of mustachios; and although he and his contemporaries would not have applied the word to the whole beard, their pairs of whiskers did not mean the hair growing upon a man's jowls. With that form of the beard they were unacquainted, the fashion of wearing it so being of later introduction. When, however, the two side tufts did appear (and at first they were shrinking little encroachments upon the smooth of the face) they were naturally also called whiskers, or very often, distinctively, side-whiskers; and then, as the beard upon the upper lip had a name peculiar to itself, adopted from the Continental languages, mustachio, the discriminating tendency of language soon confined whiskers to the beard left to grow on the sides of the face. This has been the usage for the last half century. Before that time, however, the word was very vaguely used, as will appear by a note written by Byron, in the assumed

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character of Horace Hornem, a midland county squire, upon the following couplet in The Waltz:

"Transferred to those ambiguous things that ape Goats in their visage, women in their shape." Upon this the country gentleman is made to remark: "It cannot be complained now, as in the Lady Baussière's time of the Sieur de la Croix, that there beno whiskers;' but how far these are indications of valor in the field may still be questionable. Much may be and hath been avouched on both sides. In the olden time, philosophers had whiskers, and soldiers none. Scipio himself was shaven; Hannibal thought his one eye handsome enough, without a beard; but Adrian, the emperor, wore a beard, having warts on his chin, which neither the Empress Sabina, nor even the courtiers, could abide. Turenne had whiskers, Marlborough none; Bonaparte is unwhiskered, the regent whiskered: argal greatness of mind and whiskers may or may not go together. But certainly the different occurrences since the growth of the last mentioned go further in behalf of whiskers than the anathema of Anselm did against long hair in the reign of Henry I."

Observe the implication that at the time when this was written (1812) whiskers were held appropriate only to those who had shown valor in the field; they were the peculiar ornament of a soldier's face. Turenne's whiskers, as his portrait shows us, were mustachios; but the prince regent's were side-whiskers. The whiskers that the philosophers wore were either mustachios or the whole beard. So far Byron. Beard worn upon the chin was, however, called a "peaked beard," or a "shovel beard,” or a spade beard," according to its form; never whiskers, I believe; so that the Westernism has not the support of English usage at any time in its favor. Hair upon the chin is called, par excellence, beard by those who speak good English.

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I trust that my correspondents will agree with me that I have now quite sufficiently discussed this grave ques

tion.

Another British correspondent, known as the author of a book upon a subject kindred to that of his letter, writes me from Huddersfield, England, and takes me courteously to task for "calling a dissenting minister a clergyman." This, he says, is an Americanism. He adds: "No dissenting minister in England ever professed to be in orders,' and therefore never claims to be a clergyman. All dissenting ministers are by English law laymen only, and are never called clergymen." Will my respected correspondent pardon me for saying that, although I thank him for the favor of his letter, in communicating to me the facts upon which it is founded he was bringing coals to Newcastle? What he tells me about the positions of clergymen of the Church of England who are in holy orders, and dissenting ministers, I have known from my earliest boyish memory of such things. Bred in the straitest sect of Anglican Episcopacy, I was taught by example, if not by precept, to call no ministers even here clergymen but those who were in orders in the American branch of the Anglican Church. My correspondent might have added, with equal superfluity, that the title "Reverend" is denied by some persons in England to all but clergymen of the Church of England, and its assumption by other ministers disputed. But after I began to think for myself about such subjects, I saw that this exclusion in language was illiberal and disrespectful; and observing that there was good English authority for my conclusion, I acted accordingly in my use of clergyman and reverend. In his very positive and very exclusive assertion that dissenting ministers are 66 never called clergymen in England," and that the calling them so is an Americanism, my respected correspondent has been misled as to what is fact by his strong conviction of what fact ought to be. Not so, however, Dr. Fitzedward Hall, who without any such conviction blundered into the same error, saying that in the sentence, "The use of this adjective [divine] as a noun meaning a clergyman, a minister of the gospel, is supported by long usage and

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high authority," clergyman is used in a sense now uncurrent in England." (Recent Exemplifications, etc., page 73.)

In some previous remarks upon this performance of Dr. Hall's, I, supposing that he, writing upon language, regarded the subject from a linguistic point of view, and not from that of the Court of Arches, met his assertion accordingly. But now, supposing his assertion to be the same with that of my correspondent, who has the courtesy which Dr. Hall always lacks, I shall expose the presuming ignorance which he has provoked me to expose heretofore on so many occasions. The word clergyman is applied by Englishmen of the best class to ministers of the gospel of all churches, as in the following examples:

"He supped as usual, and even invited the provost-marshal and the clergyman [a Dutch dominie], who had been sent to see him, to join him at supper." (Edinburgh Review, July, 1874: Art., Life and Death of Barneveldt.)

"In Hungary there are seven hundred and three Catholic priests; but of that number the large minority of two hundred and sixty-eight belong to the Panslav party; while out of one hundred and seventy-eight Lutheran clergymen ninety are Panslavists." (London Spectator, March 9, 1878.)

It is specifically applied in England, in the most unexceptionable quarters, to dissenting ministers of all denominations, as in the following passages; the first from the highest of all high Tory writ

ers:

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Upon this subject, in its relation not to Latin but to classical English, we have an essay in our own times from a writer of great talent, Mr. Foster, the Baptist clergyman." (De Quincey, Dr. Parr, etc., Works, vol. v. p. 190).

"Most of the denominations have ceased to depend entirely on the mother country for their supply of clergymen and ministers, and have established institutions for the theological education of young men who wish to be trained for the ministry." (Rev. John Milner, B. A., in Cruise of the Galatea, 1869, page 436.)