The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations, tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring, and bursting into base-and foot-ball in the midsummer solstice, strict tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still "busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In different latitudes the phrase varies,--one-half of it going to Plymouth Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this tendency to dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "porgie." And apropos of him, let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the _hetairai_ of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic courtesans the epithet of [Greek: saperdion], the name of a small fish very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate. But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr., as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once _his_, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity. Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the _ignoble vulgus_ to give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But