"Indeed!" says this gentle creature standing by him; and her upturned eyes are full of an innocent belief. You would swear she was meditating on summoning instantly her boys from Epsom College that they might acquire a pure accent—or get rid of all accent—on the banks of the Clyde. "Yes," say the Laird, with a decision almost amounting to enthusiasm, "it is a grand inheritance that we in the south of Scotland are preserving for you English people; and you know little of it. You do not know that we are preserving the English language for you as it was spoken centuries ago, and as you find it in your oldest writings. Scotticisms! Why, if ye were to read the prose of Mandeville or Wyclif, or the poetry of Robert of Brunne or Langdale, ye would find that our Scotticisms were the very pith and marrow of the English language. Ay; it is so." The innocent eyes express such profound interest that the Laird of Denny-mains almost forgets about the coming steamer, so anxious is he to crush us with a display of his erudition. "It is just remarkable," he says, "that your dictionaries should put down, as obsolete, words that are in common use all over the south of Scotland, where, as I say, the old Northumbrian English is preserved in its purity; and that ye should have learned people hunting up in Chaucer or Gower for the very speech that they might hear among the bits o’ weans running about the Gallowgate or the Broomielaw. ’_Wha’s acht ye?_’ you say to one of them; and you think you are talking Scotch. No, no; _acht_ is only the old English for possession: isn’t ’_Wha’s acht ye?_’ shorter and pithier than ’_To whom do you belong?_’ "Oh, certainly!" says the meek disciple: the recall of the boys from Surrey is obviously decided on. "And _speir_ for _inquire_; and _ferly_ for _wonderful_; and _tyne_ for _lose_; and _fey_ for _about to die_; and _reek_ for _smoke_; and _menseful_ for _becoming_; and _belyve_, and _fere_, and _biggan_, and such words. Ye call them Scotch? Oh, no, ma’am; they are English; ye find them in all the old English writers; and they are the best of English too; a great deal better than the Frenchified stuff that your southern English has become." Not for worlds would the Laird have wounded the patriotic sensitiveness of this gentle friend of his from the South; but indeed, she had surely nothing to complain of in his insisting to an Englishwoman on the value of thorough English? "I thought," says she, demurely, "that the Scotch had a good many French words in it." The Laird pretends not to hear: he is so deeply interested in the steamer which is now coming over the smooth waters of the bay. But, having announced that there are a great many people on board, he returns to his discourse. "Ah’m sure of this, too," says he, "that in the matter of pronunciation the Lowland Scotch have preserved the best English—you can see that _faither_, and _twelmonth_, and _twa_, and such words are nearer the original Anglo-Saxon——"