THIS, as Dr Jessop charmingly names Norfolk, is Arcady. The scene is pleasant, but the stage waits: where are the actors? Gone, where and for what reasons beyond the substitution of rail for road shall presently be considered. But if the merry days of old are done and population dwindled, at least in East Anglia, and especially in Norfolk, dialect flourishes among those who remain. The "Norfolk drant" or drawl, is still heard, just as the "Suffolk whine"--that rising inflection of the voice towards the end of sentences--is even yet a mark of the sister county. They are, indeed, said to have originated the Yankee combined drawl and twang, for Norfolk and Suffolk were largely represented among the Pilgrim Fathers, the first colonists of North America. With these survivals, some of the old rustic simplicity is still met with, although the extraordinary ignorance of sixty years ago has disappeared, and the Norfolk labourer no longer thinks it possible to emigrate to America by driving over in a farm cart. The story is an East Anglian classic, how a farm labourer "didn't fare rightly to knaw" by what route they were going to the United States, "but we'm gwine ter sleep t' Debenham the fust night, so's to kinder break t' jarney." When railways came, and access to London grew easy, these simplicities gradually faded away. The young men took to "gettin' up the road," as the saying ran--otherwise, going to London--to "better themselves," and old illusions were soon dispelled; but in Arcady the mavis may still be seen knapping a dodman; the children of the rustic hamlets may be observed by the passing stranger gleefully sporting at the old game of tittymatorterin; the cowslips that in springtime turn the meadows to living gold are yet "paigles"; a small field remains, as ever, a "pightle," and when a countryman throws anything into a ditch, he "hulls" (or hurls) "it in t' holl," just as his ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Let some of the archaic words just noted be explained before we proceed any further. "Mavis" is the idyllic name of the thrush, and the "dodman," which he may be observed "knapping," or breaking, is a snail; called in Essex, by the way, a "hodmadod." "Tittymatorterin" is just the simple game of "see-sawing." Besides these fleeting instances there are many other peculiarities. The Norfolk peasant will never pronounce the letter E if it be possible to avoid it. It becomes I in his mouth, and a head becomes a "hid," while hens are "hins." Throughout the whole of the eastern counties, too, the elision of the final in the present tense is a feature of rustic talk. Examples of this peculiarity are found not only in modern speech, but in old epitaphs and inscriptions, dating back some hundreds of years. Thus, a bridge across the River Wensum, at Norwich, bears the sculptured effigy of a dragon's head with the words, "When dragon drink, Heigham sink." The meaning is that when the river rises