achieved;--and we cannot help thinking, that the life, invention, and vigor shown in our popular speech, and the freedom with which it is shaped to the need of those who wield it, are of the best omen for our having a swan at last. [Footnote A: _Gedrängtes Handbuch der Fremdwörter_, etc., etc., Leipzig, 1852.] [Footnote B: Take, for instance, the "negro so black that charcoal made a chalk-mark on him," or the "shingle painted to look so like stone that it sank in water,"--itself overpersuaded by the skill of the painter. We overheard the following dialogue last winter. (Thermometer,--12°.) "Cold, this morning."--"That's _so_. Hear what happened to Joe?"--"No, I didn't."--"Well, the doctors had ben givin' him one thing another with merc'ry in't, and he walked out down to the Post-Office and back, and when he come home he kind o' felt somethin' hard in his boots. Come to pull 'em off, they found a lump o' quicksilver in both on 'em."--"Sho!"--"Fact; it had shrunk clean down through him with the cold." This rapid power of dramatizing a dry fact, of putting it into flesh and blood, and the instantaneous conception of Joe as a human thermometer, seem to us more like the poetical faculty than anything else. It is, at any rate, humor, and not mere quickness of wit,--the deeper, and not the shallower quality. Humor tends always to overplus of expression; wit is mathematically precise. Captain Basil Hall denied that our people had humor; but did he possess it himself? for, if not, he would never find it. Did he always feel the point of what was said to himself? We doubt, because we happen to know a chance he once had given him in vain. The Captain was walking up and down the _piazza_ of a country tavern while the couch changed horses. A thunderstorm was going on, and, with that pleasant European air of indirect self-compliment in condescending to American merit, which is so conciliating, he said to a countryman lounging near, "Pretty heavy thunder, you have here." The other, who had taken his measure at a glance, drawled gravely, "Waal, we _du_, considerin' the number of inhabitants."] Even persons not otherwise interested in the study of provincialisms will find Mr. Bartlett's book an entertaining one. The passages he quotes in illustration are sometimes strangely comic. Here is one: "To SAVE. To make sure, i.e., to kill game, or an enemy, whether man or beast. _To get_ conveys the same meaning.... The notorious Judge W---- of Texas ... once said in a speech at a barbecue, (after his political opponent had been apologizing for taking a man's life in a duel,)-- "'The gentleman need not make such a fuss about _getting_ such a rascal; everybody knows that I have shot three, and two of them I _saved_.'"