“Heft,” too, is another similar instance of an Old-English word in good use in America and to be found in the best American authors, but here in England only employed by our rustics. To “heft” (from _hebban_, with the inflexions, _hefest_, “hefð,” still used), signifies to lift, with the implied meaning of weighing. So, “to heft the bee-pots,” is to lift them in order to feel how much honey they contain. The substantive “heft” is used for weight, as, “the heft of the branches.” Again, also, the good Old-English word “loute” (_lutan_), to bend, bow, and so to touch the hat, to be heard every day in the Forest, though nearly forgotten elsewhere in England, may be found in Longfellow’s _Children of the Lord’s Supper_:— “as oft as they named the Redeemer, Lowly louted the boys, and lowly the maidens all courtesied.” In fact, one-half of the words which are considered Americanisms are good Old-English words, which we have been foolish enough to discard. Let us now take another class of words, which will help to explain difficult or corrupt passages in our poets. There is, for instance, the word “bugle” (_buculus_), meaning an ox (used, as Mr. Wedgwood[229] notices, in Deut. xiv. in the Bible, 1551), which is forgotten even by the peasantry, and only to be seen, as at Lymington and elsewhere, on a few inn-signs, with a picture sometimes of a cow, by way of explanation. I have more than once thought, that when Rosalind, in _As You Like It_ (Act iii., sc. 5), speaks of Phœbe’s “bugle eyeballs,” she means not merely her sparkling eyes, as the notes say, but rather her large, expressive eyes, in the sense in which Homer calls Herê βοῶπις. To give another illustration of the value of provincialisms in such cases, let us take the word “bumble,” which not only in the New Forest means, in its onomatopoëtic sense, to buzz, hum, or boom, as in the common proverb, “to bumble like a bee in a tar-tub,” and as Chaucer says, in _The Wife of Bath’s Tale_— “A bytoure bumbleth in the myre,” but is also used of people stumbling or halting. Probably, in _The Merry Wives of Windsor_ (Act iii., sc. 3), in the passage which has been of such difficulty to the commentators, where Mrs. Ford says to the servants, who are carrying Falstaffe in the buck-basket—“Look, how you drumble,” which has no meaning at all, we should, instead, read this word. It, at all events, not only conveys good sense, but is the exact kind of word which the passage seems to expect. Again, the compound “thiller-horse,” from the Old-English “þill,” a beam or shaft, and so, literally, the shaft-horse, which we find in Shakspeare under the form of “thill-horse” (_Merchant of Venice_, Act ii., sc. 2), is here commonly used.