la roulotte de Pantin trime dans le sabri_, (the dog barks, I suspect that the Paris diligence is passing through the wood); _le dab est sinve, la dabuge est merloussière, la fée est bative,_ (the master is stupid, the mistress is cunning, and the daughter pretty). Most frequently, in order to throw out listeners, slang confines itself to adding indistinctly to all the words of the language, a species of ignoble tail, a termination in _aille, orgue, iergue,_ or _uche_. Thus: _Vouziergue trouvaille bonorgue ce gigotmuche?_ (Do you find that leg of mutton good?) This was a remark made by Cartouche to a jailer, in order to learn whether the sum offered him for an escape suited him. The termination in _mar_ has been very recently added. Slang, being the idiom of corruption, is itself quickly corrupted. Moreover, as it always tries to hide itself so soon as it feels that it is understood, it transforms itself. Exactly opposed to all other vegetables, every sunbeam kills what it falls on in it. Hence slang is being constantly decomposed and re-composed; and this is an obscure and rapid labor which never ceases, and it makes more way in ten years than language does in ten centuries. Thus _larton_ (head) becomes _lartif; gail_ (horse) _gaye; fertanche_ (straw) _fertille; momignard_ (the child) _momacque; fiques_ (clothes) _frusques; chique_ (the church) _l'égrugeoir_; and _colabre_ (the neck) _colas_. The devil is first _gahisto_, then _le rabouin_, and next "the baker;" a priest is the _ratichon_, and then the _sanglier_; a dagger is the _vingt-deux_, next the _surin_, and lastly the _lingre_; the police are _railles_, then _roussins_, then _marchands de lacet_ (handcuff dealers), then _coqueurs,_ and lastly _cognes_; the executioner is the _taule_, then _Charlot_, then the _atigeur_, and then the _becquillard._ In the seventeenth century to fight was to "take snuff;" in the nineteenth it is "to break the jaw;" but twenty different names have passed away between these two extremes, and Cartouche would speak Hebrew to Lacenaire. All the words of this language are perpetually in flight, like the men who employ them. Still, from time to time, and owing to this very movement, the old slang reappears and becomes new again. It has its headquarters where it holds its ground. The Temple preserved the slang of the seventeenth century, and Bicêtre, when it was a prison, that of Thunes. There the termination in _anche_ of the old Thuners could be heard: _Boyanches-tu?_ (do you drink?); _il croyanche_ (he believes). But perpetual motion does not the less remain the law. If the philosopher succeeds in momentarily fixing, for the purpose of observation, this language, which is necessarily evaporating, he falls into sorrowful and useful meditations, and no study is more efficacious, or more fertile and instructive. There is not a metaphor or an etymology of slang which does not contain a lesson.