much worse, is the geographical name of Key, as applied to ledges of rock rising near the surface of the water, and low, flat islands in the West Indies. The word is derived from the Spanish Cayo, a name given, among others, to the small islands on the coast of Florida, which was retained after the acquisition of that State, but pronounced as it now is written. One of the best known among them, Key West, has suffered still further ill treatment; it was originally Cayo Hueso, Bone Island.

Where formerly Spanish coins were current the word pieza, a piece, may still be occasionally heard in the transactions between Americans even, when a small silver coin, the Spanish real (de plata), is meant. In other parts of the Union it is represented by a term which has come from the West Indies. There-especially in Jamaica-a bit meant the smallest silver coin current, worth about sevenpence ha'penny; from thence the Southern States obtained their bit, fully known as fi'-penny-bit, amounting to six and a quarter cents; a defaced twenty-cent piece being called a long bit. With the disappearance of the Spanish coins from the United States, the word has gone nearly out of use. In England, however, fourpence continues to be called a bit, at least in city slang. The picayune, on the contrary, originally a Carib word, or possibly akin to French pécune, has not only held its own but become a popular word in familiar language. It was long used to designate, in Louisiana, Florida, etc., the Spanish half-real, and was next transferred to the American sixpence. The coin no longer exists in currency, but the term remains to designate anything peculiarly small and pitiful. "The whole thing this year was a miserable picayune affair," says the New Orleans Delta of the Boeuf Gras of 1866, an expression exactly corresponding to the Northern phrase: "a one-horse affair." "A dozen Picayune Amnesty Bills," states the New York Tribune, "will do much to inflame and diffuse Southern discontent, nothing to allay it." (Dec. 12, 1870.) The only serious use made of the term is found in the name of a very clever daily newspaper, published under the name of the Picayune, in the city of New Orleans, and sold for that coin, a fact which strangely recalls the name of the very first of all newspapers, published in Venice, and called Gazeta, from the coin of that name, for: "If you will have a stool, it will cost you a gazet, which is almost a penny." (Coryat. Crudities, II., p. 15.)

Of ill-treated Spanish words, perhaps none has suffered more grievously than piragua, a word probably of Indian origin in the first place, but introduced into the world of letters in this form, and soon adopted by the French also as pirogue, which is most familiar to American ears. Meaning, originally, a canoe formed of a single large tree, or sometimes two such trunks lashed together, it is in the United States used promiscuously for any small boat or canoe, and even for a larger vessel carrying two masts and a leeboard, such as were formerly used as ferryboats in the neighborhood of New York. But the word was soon Americanized in a variety of ways, and, except in print, its true form is hardly ever preserved. It appears in the West as periauger, a form under which it is used by W. Irving (Washington, II., p. 272), as periauga in Virginia, and thus quoted from the Western papers (p. 13), and even as pettiauger in the Far West. A mere grammatical perversion, involving, however, no less violence, is the use of the Spanish imperative, Vamos, as an English verb, which has of late become so universal that it is actually often written: to vamose. The interjection, corresponding very nearly to our: Well! became familiar to the American troops during the Mexican War in 1847, and being uncommonly popular among them, it soon spread as a cant term all over the Union. Now it is a verb: "Before the speaker's voice could be heard every democratic member had vamosed, and since that day no quorum has ever been present," was said of the Indiana Legislature. (February 18, 1870.) Mr. Bartlett quotes from a book, "Southern Sketches," the phrase vamosed the ranch, and calls this process of appropriating words: "breaking Priscian's head with a vengeance." (Dict., p. 496.) Since J. R. Lowell, however, has used to vamose, the word must probably be considered naturalized.

In a recent poem by John Hay occur the following lines:

"The nigger has got to mosey
From the limits o' Spunky P'int."

(Banty Tim.)

This mysterious word mosey is, probably correctly, said to be nothing more than a mere variety of the Americanized verb vamose, with the final vowel sounded, and the first syllable lost. It certainly has the same meaning, of leaving suddenly, and generally involuntarily. "My friend, let me tell you, if you do not

mosey this instant, and clear out for good, you'll have to pay pretty dear." (Louisville Journal, October 9, 1857.) In this sense it has crossed the ocean, and reappears in English slang, especially as a summons: "Now, Mosey!" Its derivation from a mythical Moses, warmly as it is supported by English writers, has no foundation in fact, and is " only a new instance of the tendency to mythologize, which is as strong as ever among the uneducated." (Atlantic Monthly, August, 1860.) The Celtic proves its usual readiness to supply an ancestor to the quaint word, and proves its claims by the habit of Cornish miners to say, Moas, for Go! The verb is, of course, an entirely different word from that which enters into the composition of Moseysugar, molasses-candy with the meat of nuts mixed up with it. The latter comes from Mosaic, which the kind of inlaid work produced by the two colors, white and brown, resembles in some manner. Few would recognize the proud old Spanish word cavar, which denoted the haughty, impatient pawing of a spirited horse, in the half-ludicrous term: to cavort. It is true, its derivation is sometimes sought in the verb: to curvet, from the French courbetter, but the fact that the term is very frequently not only pronounced but also written cavault, seems to speak in favor of its Spanish origin. It is now used, especially in the South, for any very extravagant manner of speaking or acting, with an intention of ridiculing the action. Thus Judge Longstreet makes one of his heroes of "Georgia Scenes" say: "In they came, boys and girls, old and young, making a prodigious noise, and prancing and cavorting at a tremendous rate." A recent traveller in South Carolina describes a court-scene thus: "In the court, a judge in a black silk gown, and a jury of nine whites and three blacks, were trying a black, evil-looking, one-eyed negro, for disturbing a religious meeting. The witnesses were all negroes, and the gist of their testimony was that Tony, the accused, came to the meetinghouse, and-jes kep cavortin' round." (New York Tribune, May 7, 1871.)

Spanish terms may appropriately come to an end with the word Zombi, a phantom or a ghost, not unfrequently heard in the Southern States in nurseries and among the servants. The word is a Creole corruption of the Spanish sombra, which at times has the same meaning.

THE GERMAN.

"I schpeaksch English."-Hans Breitmann.

EVEN that more remarkable than creditable propensity of the German, to assert his cosmopolitan character by abandoning his nationality, and by repudiating, after a few years' residence abroad, all attachment to his own language, his national views, and private convictions, has not prevented statisticians from finding more than five millions of Germans in the United States. They are, moreover, not limited, like the Dutch and the French, to certain circumscribed localities; they are not scattered and lost in the great Anglo-Saxon family, like the Irish and the Welsh. Far from it; they constitute a large proportion of the population of great cities, and own vast tracts of land in all the agricultural States; they have their temples to worship Gambrinus in Boston and in New Orleans, in Norfolk and in San Francisco. Their press is powerful and high-toned, their potent voice is heard in State Legislatures and in the national Senate. Their influence is felt in every State, and their vote is decisive in great crises.

And yet they have not enriched our language by a dozen important words! The very fact of their excessive readiness to adapt themselves to all the exigencies of their new home, their unwillingness to use their own idiom as soon as they have acquired sufficient English to converse in it freely, and their prompt admission of the superiority of American terms as well as institutions, have well-nigh neutralized the influence they might nave exercised by their numbers, their intelligence, and their superior education. They have, no doubt, powerfully affected the national mind in all that pertains to the realm of thought—

American churches, American letters, and even American manners bear more or less the impress of German teachings; but the marks are not visible, because the action has been too subtle and slow, too secret and silent, to leave its traces on the surface.

This is all the more true of our speech, as their own beautiful and highly improved idiom, so near akin to our tongue, has sadly suffered by the contact with English. Scholars coming over from Germany remark with deep regret how rapidly their beloved language is yielding to the might of American nationality. They point with ineffable pain to the jargon spoken, written, and even printed in Pennsylvania-a hopeless departure from the old standard, and shocking in its barbarous admixture of English terms, which it mutilates as savagely as its own. The lines:

"My Mary cot one leetle sheeps,

Hees flees so vite mit schnow,
Und efry blace als Mary pin,

Dat tam leetle sheeps will go,"

show the havoc the uneducated German, whose ear cannot distinguish between b and p, or d and t, plays with English; and the following will, in like manner, illustrate the injury done to the mother-tongue :

"Mudder, may I a schwimming went?

Nix, my grosse dotter!

I bet twice more als foofty cent,

Dat you get drowned in de votter."

(Acorn and Germ, Millwood, Pennsylvania, Sept. 14, 1870.)

Hans Breitmann's Ballads (by Charles G. Leland), give an example of the process which, artificial in the poems, goes on naturally in the regions where uneducated Germans and the descendants of such come in contact with the superior English which is spoken throughout the United States. On the other hand, in cities and a few specially favored districts, where a higher class of Germans are brought in contact with each other, they still speak their own language, publish their own newspapers, almanacs, and light literature, and have their own schools and churches, where instruction is given and services are held in German.

The result is, that with the exception of one or two German