The word _earn_ reminds us of a time when the chief way of earning money or payment of any kind was field-labour; for this word, which means so many things now, comes from an old Teutonic word meaning field-labour. The same word became in German _ernte_, which means "harvest." Another common word with somewhat the same meaning as _earn_ is _gain_; and this, again, takes us back to a time when our early ancestors won their profits by the grazing of their flocks. The word _gain_ came into English from an Old French word, but this word in its turn came from a Teutonic word meaning to graze or pasture. The first people who used the word _earn_ for other ways of getting payment than field-labour, and the word _gain_ in a general sense, were really making metaphors. Some of our commonest words take us back to a time before our ancestors even settled down to cultivate the land, or perhaps even before the days when they had learned to tame and give pasturage to their flocks. Some of our simplest words contain the idea of _travelling_ or _wandering_. The word _fear_, which would not seem to have anything to do with journeying, comes from the same root-word as _fare_, the Old English word for "travel." Probably it came to be used because people travelling through the wild forests and swamps of Europe in those far-off days found much to terrify them, and so the word _fear_ was made, containing this idea of moving from place to place. But again this was a metaphor. Until after the Norman Conquest the word _fear_ meant a sudden or terrible happening. Only later it came to mean the feeling which such an event or the expectation of it would cause. We may become tired in mind or body from many causes; but when we say we are "weary" we are literally saying that we have travelled far over difficult ground, for the word _weary_ comes from an Old English word meaning this. Some of our words are really metaphors showing the effect which different aspects of Nature had on the men who made them. When we say we are astonished we do not mean that we are "struck by thunder," but that is what the word literally means. It comes from the Latin word _attonare_, which means this. The words _astound_ and _stun_ contain the same hidden metaphor, which we use in a plainer way when we say we are "thunder-struck," meaning that we are very much surprised.