I have got a bill here for ‘mendin gardin oz’--hose--and I have seen a bill in Bedfordshire for ‘hoke’ and ‘hellum’ and ‘hash.’ With phonetic spelling there would be as many written languages as there are dialects now--water would be ‘warter’ in the Eastern counties, and ‘watter’ or ‘wetter’ here--but fonetic fanatics would take the cockney dialect and foist it on us all. On looking at an Elementary English Grammar, of which 350,000 have been sold, I found it said--“Take c out of the alphabet, and we could write, kat, sity, speshal, instead of cat, city, special, and in thus writing those words, we should be writing them according to their pronunciation.” No doubt, the cockney news-boys screech out ‘Extra Speshal’; but if we are to get pronunciation down from town, we might get it from the West End rather than the East. Sometimes people make mistakes here about the origin of words--Reformatory is not Reform-a-Tory, as ardent Liberals said--and sometimes they make mistakes about the words themselves. During the War there was an entertainment for wounded soldiers at a house not far from here; and they came up in chars-à-banc with bagpipes playing all the way. I heard a small boy calling out, “Hearken to that music there,” and another one snubbing him, “Bain’t music, ‘tbe the magpies.” On first hearing of a Turkish bath, a girl assumed that it must be a turkeys’ bath. I picture an old turkey-cock jerking his head about and gobbling while he was screwing up his courage for a header into the cold plunge. A cockney was greeted by a man down here with courteous inquiries about her health, “And how be you now? Be you all right?” The reply was, “No, half right, half left, like you”; and he told me that he had to do a bit of thinking afore he saw the sense of it. An old lady here surprised me just as much in town. She had not been there before, though well advanced in years; and I took her up in the Great Wheel at Earl’s Court to get a good look round. She told me afterwards, “I were a-thinkin’ all the time how Satan took our Lord up into an exceedin’ high place a-seein’ all the kingdoms of the world.” I once heard a cockney expressing her contempt for everybody born elsewhere. She said with pride, “I was born and bred where I stand,” and she was standing in a gutter in a slum. Londoners do not often give themselves away like that: they usually are people of resource. I complained to an umbrella-maker that a new umbrella kept turning inside-out, and with a jerk I turned it inside out at once. He took the umbrella, jerked it the other way and said, “You see, sir, it comes back again quite easily.” I complained to a stationer that his envelopes did not stick. He replied with dignity, “No, sir, they do not: we use only the purest gum.”