SWALE: a hollow. New England. English also; see Forby. TORMENTED: euphemistic, as "not a _tormented_ cent." New England. WELL-SWEEP. We have gone through Mr. Bartlett's book with the attention which a work so well done deserves, and are thoroughly impressed with the amount of care and labor to which it bears witness. We have quarrelled with it wherever we could, because it cannot fail to become the standard authority in its department. Its value will increase from year to year. For instance, the Spanish words, in which it is especially rich, are doomed to undergo strange metamorphoses on Anglo-Saxon lips; for it is the instinct of the unlearned to naturalize words as fast as possible, and to compel them to homebred shapes and sounds. There is often an unwitting humor in these perversions,[A] and they are always interesting as showing that it is the nature of man to use words with understanding, however appearances might lead us to an opposite conclusion. [Footnote A: We remember once hearing a man say of something, that it was written in a "very grand delinquent [grandiloquent] style,"--a phrase certainly not without modern application. We have heard also Angola-Saxons and Angular-Saxons,--the latter, at least, not an unhappy perversion.] The least satisfactory part of Mr. Bartlett's book is the Appendix, in which he has got together a few proverbs and similes, which, it seems to us, do no kind of justice to the humor and invention of the people. Most of them have no characteristic at all, except coarseness. We hope there is nothing peculiarly American in such examples as these:--"Evil actions, like crushed rotten eggs, stink in the nostrils of all"; and "Vice is a skunk that smells awfully rank when stirred up by the pole of misfortune." These have, beside, an artificial air, and are quite too long-skirted for working proverbs, in which language always "takes off its coat to it," if we may use a proverbial phrase, left out by Mr. Bartlett. We confess, we looked for something racier and of a more _puckery_ flavor. One hears such now and then, mostly from the West,--like "Mean enough to steal acorns from a blind hog"; "I take my tea _bar-foot_," the answer of a backwoodsman, when asked if he would have cream and sugar. Some are unmistakably Eastern; as, "All deacons are good,--but there's odds in deacons"; "He's a whole team and the dog under the wagon"; "That's first-rate and a half"; "Handy as a pocket in a shirt" (ironical). Almost every county has some good die sinker in language, who mints phrases that pass into the currency of a whole neighborhood. We picked up two such the other day, both of the same coinage. The county-jail (the only stone building where all the dwellings were of wood) was described as "the house whose underpinning comes up to the eaves"; while the place unmentionable to ears polite was "where they don't rake up the fires at night." A man, speaking to