A close student of the English language, thoroughly conversant with all the local peculiarities that characterise the speech of the several parts of our country comprised within the bounds of the original Thirteen Colonies, knows that different words and expressions, retaining their seventeenth or eighteenth century significance, have lingered in different communities. The mountaineers of Kentucky still replenish their pipes from “pokes” of tobacco; in Virginia and Maryland, insufficiently baked bread is said not to have “soaked” long enough, meaning that it has not stayed in the oven as long as it ought; in Pennsylvania we still “fetch” things when we go for them and bring them back with us; and the soles of outworn New England shoes are “tapped,” though they may be “half-soled” in other parts of the country, and New England nags are “baited” at inn stables. Now all these archaisms, if one chooses so to call them, are of impeccable English derivation, though many of them have long since fallen into disuse in England, and they were of common and correct usage at the time of the colonists’ emigration to the New World. The Colonies were always conservative--provincial places usually are--and our very retention of the virile forms of speech in ordinary use in the England of the Stuarts and the House of Hanover has contributed not a little to the foundation of our just boast that the English spoken today in Virginia, Maryland, parts of the Carolinas, eastern Pennsylvania and New England is better and purer than most of the English now spoken in England itself. The only feature of this phenomenon of speech persistence not fully explicable is the fact that certain parts of linguistic tradition have been perpetuated in some parts of the country while others are to be found only in localities far removed so that a Virginian’s allusion to bread insufficiently “soaked” would be unintelligible in Massachusetts. If the vitality of usage is so noticeable in a fluid and mutable thing like language, it is not surprising that architecture, which is visible and comparatively permanent in its manifestation, should exhibit in a markedly obvious manner an adherence to traditional forms. Nor is it surprising, considering the diversity of the speech forms singled out by chance for perpetuation in different parts of the country, to find a similar diversity in the retention of local architectural forms, though all may be of purely English origin.