And do you not remember (on we go, voyaging among the C's,) a time, a happy time, before you knew what digestion meant, when you delighted to _cranch_ the unripe gooseberry, until you heard the _clomp_ of the paternal tread on the _causey_, and crouched lest you should _catch it_, hid to escape a hiding; and how, nevertheless, swift retribution followed upon the track of crime, and you suffered those internal pains, which were vulgarly known as _colly-wobbles_, and were _coddled_, in consequence, upon your mother's knee? Going on to D--Dickens, in a description of a street row, represents one of the lady disputants as saying to her adversary, "You go home, and, when you are quite sober, mend your stockings"; and he adds that these allusions, not only to her intemperate habits but to the state of her wardrobe, were so exasperating to the accused party that she proceeded to comply, not with the suggestion of her accuser, but with the request of the bystanders, and to "pitch in" with considerable alacrity. Assuming that her hose was as reported, let us hope that she had the worst of the combat, for there is something in the idea of a _dowdy_ which is hateful to the manly mind. How life-like the portrait which the word paints for us! a coarse, fat female, her dingy cap, with its faded ribbons, awry upon her unkempt hair; eyes hookless, holes buttonless, upon her shabby gown; a boot-lace trailing on the ground. When we clergy visit Mrs. Dowdy's home, or the residence of her sister, Mrs. Slattern, and find that, though it is towards evening, they have not tidied either self or house, we know why the children are unhealthy and untaught, and why the husband prefers the warmth and cleanliness of "The Manor Arms" to his own miserable hut. As a house-keeper, Mrs. Dowdy could only "please the pigs"; and this reminds me what an apt word we have in _dunky_ for a rotund, obese, little porket. I do not find the latter in Johnson, but dowdy in Shakespeare, and _slattern_ is from the Swedish. No word suggests itself as I stand at E's, and I therefore proceed with a sonata in F, composed, not by Beethoven, but by a horse-breaker, with certain amplifications of my own: "The young horse was in famous _fettle_, and _framed_ splendidly over the _flakes_; but he seemed all of a _flabber-gaster_ when he caught sight of the water, put himself into a regular _fandango_, and the more I _flanked_ him the more he _funked,_ till in he went with a _flop._"