‘Chew, sir,’ is a form of rebuke applied to a snarling dog. ‘Dwamish’ means faint and sick, from ‘dwam,’ a Scotch word signifying a swoon or a sudden attack of illness. ‘Dunt’ means a blow, and is old English and Scotch; Burns says, ‘I’ll tak dunts frae naebody.’ A ‘founder,’ according to our dictionaries, is a term in farriery to indicate lameness caused by inflammation within the hoof of a horse. In Ulster, the word is often used to express a chill or wetting followed by illness. A man after being exposed to the vicissitudes of weather becomes seriously ill without knowing what is the matter, and he expresses his condition by saying that he has got ‘a regular founder.’ ‘Head-beetler’ is used in the same vulgar sense as ‘Head-cook and bottle-washer’ in some localities. The beetle was a machine for producing figured fabrics by the pressure of a roller, and ‘head-beetler’ probably means the chief director of this class of work. A ‘heeler’ is a cock which strikes out well with his heels. In Ulster, the word is sometimes used for a bold forward woman. When a child begins to nod and look sleepy, he is told that ‘Johnny Nod is coming up his back,’ which is understood as a signal for going to bed. ‘Potatoes and point’ is a curious phrase in which the poverty of the lower classes in Ireland finds unconscious expression. The idea is, that the potatoes before being eaten are ‘pointed’ at a herring, which is hung up to serve as an imaginary relish to the simple fare, but too precious to be freely consumed. ‘Dab at the stool’ is another expression referring to eating customs: salt is placed upon a stool, and each individual, as the potatoes are taken out of the pot, takes one and ‘dabs’ it at the stool, to get a portion of the salt. ‘Pouce’ and ‘poucey’ mean dust and dusty, but by a common perversion of language, ‘poucey’ comes to mean a person in a flax-mill who is exposed to the irritation of dusty particles, and becomes in consequence short-winded and bronchitic. ‘Roughness,’ as in Scotland, means plenty. ‘Ruction’ signifies a row, a disturbance; possibly it is a contraction of ructation, from the Latin verb _ructare_. ‘Skelly,’ to squint, is from the Scotch, and is found in Scott. The Danish is ‘skele.’ ‘Smittle,’ also used in Scotland, means infectious, and is connected with the verb to smite. ‘Think long’ means to be homesick. We thus see how much curious information and how many relics of the past are found in the despised vulgarisms of a provincial patois. They are the fossils of language, and speak to us of vanished peoples and of ages long gone by. IN ALL SHADES. CHAPTER XLVI.