word has actually found its way into French also, although only as a cant term; for M. Francisque Michel, in his Dictionnaire d'Argot, has: Beausse, un riche bourgeois, terme des voleurs Flamands. It made its way Southward, in America, but very slowly, and reached Pennsylvania only about 1852, with the construction of railways and canals. Since the emancipation of slaves in the South, the negroes also have become too proud to continue their old mode of address, and substitute for it the Northern boss, so that the word may fairly be said to be in universal use all over the Union. It has even been turned into a verb, and to boss is quite a common expression, meaning to direct anything, from bossing a job, that is, to contract and superintend it, to bossing the house, which means in the case of the husband or the wife, as Providence may direct, to rule and manage it. So familiar has the word become, that we are told of a child not five years old put into a corner for quarrelling, who wished to charge his sister with being the aggressor, and said: "I did not boss the job, it was sister." (S. S. Haldeman.) Thus the Dutchman is master in the land after all.

The word is occasionally grievously misunderstood at the South. There the negro has apparently not been able to catch the difference of sound in the Dutch boss and the English bass, and when he indulges in his favorite songs, he is quite sure to summon some skillful singer to lead, and promises to "boss him through." This meant, originally, nothing more than that he would sing the bass to the other's lead; but now it refers to the full chorus or refrain. This applies especially to the shouting songs, when the negroes form a ring, in which one half of the assembled company perform a shuffling dance, with a sort of ducking motion of the body, while the other half stand by and sing, one voice leading and stringing verse to verse, many of which are made up on the spot, and refer to the company present. These bystanders are said to boss the song.

The readers of W. Irving's delightful work on the History of New York, in which fact and fiction are so amusingly interwoven as to have deceived more than one acute critic, are familiar with his quaint and graphic description of the origin of Moving Day. He ascribes the curious custom which makes the first of May a day of horror in that city, on which every one who is not the fortu

nate owner of a house, vacates his lodgings and seeks new ones for the coming year, to the first great move made by the Dutch inhabitants of Communipaw to New Amsterdam "The anniversary," he says, "was piously observed among their sons, by turning their houses topsy-turvy, and carrying all their furniture into the streets; and this is the real origin of the universal agitation and moving, by which this most restless of cities is literally turned out of doors on every May-day." (Knickerbocker's History of New York.) The custom has certainly survived till now, and as Robert S. Coffin, the "Boston Bard," says,

“Hurry, scurry-grave and gay,

All must trudge the first of May,"

(The First of May.)

but it is older than even the ancient settlement called Communipaw. The Dutch settlers evidently brought the custom with them from their transatlantic home, and to this day, in Bruges and its neighborhood, in Verviers and many other parts of Belgium and Holland, the first of May continues to be the general day of moving. It has not only become a characteristic institution of the City of New York, but the tendency to move, constantly to shift and drift from one place to another, is, by the home-keeping Scotch and Irish especially, not quite unjustly looked upon as a sign of instability in the national character. The marvellous facility of locomotion which this country affords by its net-work of railways, rivers, and canals, favors the disposition, to which must be added the temptation held out by countless openings for all in the newer States. The roving propensity subsides, however, in nations as in individuals, and already a strong tendency is perceptible in the United States to crowd the great cities at the expense of the open country.

The custom, also, to keep one room in the house as the best room, and to call it so, which still prevails in most of the Northern States, has been bequeathed to this generation by the first Dutch settlers of New York. The same name and usage may still be found in all the old towns of Holland, where these rooms are kept as dark as here, to preserve the furniture, and only opened on great occasions, when company is expected. A person entering a bed-room, also, in some out of the way New England town,

would not fail to notice the chintz curtains and the puffy featherbed with its bolster, not as in England, tucked in under the sheet, but with its own fair case of white linen; nor could he help being struck in the kitchen with the cheap but neat tiles on the hearth, and the delft-ware on the dresser, all features that prove the former presence of stout Dutchmen in these districts.

Nor must we, finally, forget, among the many pleasant things left us by our Dutch ancestors, the one Dutchman whom all American children hold dear and in great veneration. This is Santa Klaus, as the name is commonly though erroneously written, in reality Klaas, the abbreviation of Nickolas, a Dutch Saint of undisputed nationality, whose name is heard everywhere when his own day, Christmas, is drawing near.

THE FRENCHMAN.

"Can the leopard change his spots? Can the Frenchman lose his nationality?"-E. About.

OUR English contains, of course, a large number of French terms, which we owe, in common with our English cousins, to the supremacy which France has till recently exercised in war and in fashions. It might have been expected that large additions would have been made by the frequent and numerous streams of immigration, which have come to us from France itself and from former French dependencies. The French owned Acadie, and sent their missionaries throughout the whole West; they owned Louisiana, and thus met at the mouth of the Mississippi their zealous countrymen from the far North. Noble Huguenots, animated by a fervor and a constancy in no ways inferior to that of the Puritans, came over in large numbers and settled in the Southern States, where climate and national character seemed to be congenial, and the "charitable exhibition" of King William also sent in 1700 nearly a thousand more, who had left their native land on account of their religion. At a later period new arrivals came from home and from the colonies; the French Revolution sent many hundreds, the expulsion of the French from San Domingo added large numbers, and dissatisfied Imperialists came to find homes here after the banishment of their idol to St. Helena. French colonies were attempted in Michigan and in Florida; Gallipolis bore the name of its founders; even in the Great Desert a Frenchtown had a brief existence, and the Falls of the Kanahwa were once owned by a French company. French names still remain on the map of the United States as they were first bestowed: Beaufort and Port Royal in South Carolina, speak of the Huguenot and the scholar, as La

Moille River, Calais, and Mount Desert, in New England, remind us of the enterprise and zeal of the Jesuits in the very home of Puritanism.

There is no lack, in fact, of French elements in our population, and the grateful feeling long cherished throughout the United States for the efficient help rendered by France during the War of Independence, might, it seems, have given moral weight to the influence legitimately wielded by the representatives of a polished language, a matchless literature, and highest culture. But few and faint are the marks left by the French on our public life and our language. Their own character is too light and too fickle to impress itself forcibly on the sturdy, thoughtful Anglo-Saxon, as their frequent failures to adapt themselves to Republican institutions stand in striking contrast with the success of the latter among ourselves. There are, of course, a number of French words in use among Americans, whose fondness for Gallic words and things has laid them open to the charge that good Americans hope to go to Paris hereafter, but these terms are no more Americanisms than those borrowed by the English can be called Anglicisms. We shall content ourselves, therefore, with mentioning here only such as designate objects or institutions peculiar to this country, adding a few which have here a somewhat different meaning from that given them abroad.

Even the geography of the land retains but few traces of the brave French explorers, though Marquette and his brethren are recorded in many a town and river. All the more pleasing is it to find occasionally justice done, as in the case of that beautiful sheet of water now known as Lake Champlain. It was long called Lake Corlaer, after the great man of a Dutch settlement on the Mohawk River, who "for long years swayed the civic sword so potently and with such terror to evil-doers among the Indians, that they adopted his name in their language to signify a white governor. This doughty Dutchman, therefore, left his name to his successors, and the Corlaers went through their decline and fall with as much dignity, in a small way, as history ascribes to the Pharaohs and Cæsars. Like the founders of other dynasties, however, the original Corlaer came to an untimely end, being drowned, and as the catastrophe occurred in the lake, the Dutch stubbornly regarded their own hero as having the best right to