Hearing a good deal of laughter in the lane, I inquired what was going on. And the answer was brought back:--“Please, zir, it be little Freddie ***** a-tryin’ to say swear-words, and he cannot form’n proper.” I once said a swear-word here--at least, they thought I did. A bee was pestering me persistently one afternoon, while I was sitting in the garden; and at last in a moment of irritation I called it a coleopterous creature. Someone heard me, and afterwards I heard him telling someone else:--“He were a-swearin’ fine: called ’n bally-wopserous.” A few years ago there was a child in the village, who was so absurdly like the Flora in the _Primavera_ that we always called her the little Botticelli. But this disquieted her mother; and she sent up to say that she would like to know the meaning of that word. Being of opinion that some fields near here would never yield enough to cover their rent, the farmer’s wife approached the landlord in this way:--“‘But, maister,’ saith I, ‘us cannot pluck feathers from a toad.’ And he saith, ‘so I’ve heard tell afore now, and I believe ’t be true’.” It is just the metaphor they use in France:--“Il est chargé d’argent comme un crapaud de plumes.” And when someone did a work of supererogation here, the comment was strangely like “le Bon Dieu rit énormément.” * * * * * Devonshire speech is not capricious, but has a syntax of its own. The classic phrase is ‘her told she.’ A pious person told me that ‘us didn’t love He, ’twas Him loved we.’ They never say ‘we are,’ but ‘us be’ or else ‘we am,’ contracted into ‘we’m.’ They say ‘I be’ as well as ‘I’m,’ but never ‘me’m’ or ‘me be,’ though invariably ‘me and Jarge be,’ or ‘me and Urn,’ or whatever the name is, and never ‘Ernest and I’ or ‘George and I.’ They say ‘to’ for ‘at’--‘her liveth to Moreton’--and formerly said ‘at’ for ‘to’--‘I be goin’ at Bovey’--but now it is the fashion to say ‘as far as’ Bovey.--A complete Grammar might be compiled. Happily, the school has not taught them English that is truly up to date. They have not learned to say:--“The weather conditions being favourable, the psychological moment was indulged in.” They still say:--“As ’twere fine, us did’n.” And their pronunciation is unchanged: beetles are bittles, beans are banes, and Torquay is Tarkay.