It may be said that at Pittsburg the East ends and the West begins. The division is in nothing more pronounced than in the speech of the native. In the noonday throng of the Allequippa Club it puzzles the stranger. It is not the lazy drawl that crept into the Central West from the Southeast with the early migration, and that is still discernible wherever the old stock has held its own, but a hybrid wrought of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch influences. It is less interesting for elisions and the flattening of vowels than for its cadences. In familiar dialogue these are marked and weave a spell upon the unfamiliar ear. They are not peculiar to the man in the street, but flavour in the polite babble of drawing rooms. They lure the ear of strangers, and newcomers unconsciously adopt them. The operators at the telephone exchange teach the most common and the most readily communicable of these cadences daily. In repeating a number of four figures the voice invariably rises on the next to the last syllable to fall again at the end. The native tongue, long attuned to this practice, adds a word to short sentences so that the intonation may not fail to scan and thus miss its effect. For example: “Did he get it?” does not quite lend itself to the usage; but if we prefix _And_: (And did he _get_ it?) the speaker satisfies his own ear. Those who are keen for controversy in such matters may gnaw this bone all they like. Some will trace it to Scotch, others to Irish influences; but from the lips of the pretty girls of the Greater City, whether behind shop counters or tea tables, it is melodious and haunting. To some shrewder pen than this must be left a prediction as to the ultimate fate of our language at this great Western gateway, where the mingling of dialects spoken under all the flags of Europe is bound to exert in time new influences on the common speech.