child’s apron called a “piunie,” and many other things very strange to a Pennsylvanian. In New England and as far down as New Jersey we hear many of these same expressions. Our neighbor from the “ Em pire State” does not use many forms new to us, but his accent and pronunciation are very odd. In the rural districts he well persist in putting ‘ ‘ eau ’ ’ into his words. Pie always pronounces 7107 V as if it were spelled neau, core as if spelled “ceau.” In the City of New York and its vicinity the strangest part of the com mon speech is the abuse of that most abused letter in the alphabet; viz, the letter r. Where the letter r occurs at the end of a word it is always dropped, and where it does not occur it is, when possible, put on; and to spell raw oysters as they pronounce it would be utterly impossible. As we come down along the coast we see a decided softening in the tone, and indeed in the whole makeup of the people. Here we seldom or never hear the letter r sounded at all, and a is very much softened. It is ‘‘mighty” hot in the day time and ‘‘right” warm at night, and if ‘‘you all” up therein Pennsyl vania “guess” you speak correctly “ we all ” down here in Vir ginia “reckon” you don’t know. There is also a perceptible draul in the speech which the Southerner likes “ right much.” As we continue southward the strange expressions increase in number until we reach the climax on the Florida peninsula, where the native will converse with the “green yankee ” in language scarcely intelligible to him. He “totes up a turn of wood” in his arms, lie “carries the horse and cart” to town, he “ hopes” his neighbor to do some work, he gets sick and is “ mighty puny” fora “spell,” but is soon “right piert ” again; he “rises” in the morning “an hour by day,” an hour before daylight, and quits work at night “two by sun,” two hours before sunset. Once a native related to me a story of his brother who was riding a “ wild tacky,” a Florida pony, and was thrown violently against a tree trunk, “and it killed him dead and he never did entirely over it. ” I was at a loss to know how a man could recover from such an injury, until I was told that the man simply meant that his brother was stunned else he would have said that he “died out.” The richness and variety of the slang of Florida can scarcely be imagined, for the population comes from every State in the Union ’ h new settler brings with him the slang peculiar to his own The Free Latter |’( K'Yonmi,
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers