Nor is pronunciation the only singular feature of Essex talk, as those who keep their ears alert in these parts will soon find. The oddest phrases are matters of everyday use, and the Essex peasant can no more help using the word "together," in season and out, than he can help being hungry before meals or sleepy by bedtime. "Together," as employed by the Essex peasant, is a word absolutely meaningless; a kind of linguistic excrescence which, like a wart or a boil, is neither useful nor beautiful. When a ploughman says he is going to plough "that there field together," he does not mean to imply that he is about to plough it together with some other land, or with a party of other ploughmen. He simply adds the word from force of habit, and from hearing his father and grandfather before him so use it, in almost every sentence, as a sort of verbal makeweight. The present writer has had the good fortune to hear a supremely ludicrous use of this Bœotian habit of speech. It was market-day at Colchester, and Stanway village had emptied itself in the direction of the town. A dog rolled dustily in the sunny road, and the historian of these things luxuriously quaffed his "large lemon" on the bench outside the village inn. As Artemus Ward might have said, "orl was peas," when there entered upon the scene a countryman, evidently known to the landlord. He walked into the bar, and, surprised to find mine host in solitary state, exclaimed, "What, all alone together, bor?" "Yes," replied the landlord, in no wise astonished at this extraordinary expression, "the missus has gone to Colchester together." "Did my missus go with her?" asked the rustic. "No," rejoined the landlord, "she went by herself." In this countryman's talk we find a word belonging more especially to Norfolk and Suffolk. This is the word, "bor," a diminutive for neighbour. XXV STANWAY is approached along a flat stretch, past Mark's Tey, which, without being itself quite on the road, has sent out modern and extremely ugly brick tentacles to line the way. For an incredible distance along the flat the timber tower of Mark's Tey church is visible, amid an inchoate mass of railway signal masts and puffs of smoke. Whistlings, screechings, crashings and rumblings proceed from that direction, for this is a junction of the Great Eastern with the Colne Valley Railway, and the station, by the way, where the lady in Thackeray's _Lamentable Ballad of the Foundling of Shoreditch_ appeared with the baby which she eventually left behind her. It is this busy junction that has caused the hideous outcrop of mean houses along the road to render the village of the old De Marcas something new and strange. Mark's Tey is at a junction of roads as well as of rails, for the road from Braintree and Bishop's Stortford falls in here.