aeacians, three
thousand years ago, were wonderfully like these youthful Marbleheaders.
The blue-eyed Goddess who convoys Ulysses, under the disguise of a
young maiden of the place, gives him some excellent advice. "Hold your
tongue," she says, "and don't look at anybody or ask any questions, for
these are seafaring people, and don't like to have strangers round or
anybody that does not belong here."

Who would have thought that the saucy question, "Does your mother know
you're out?" was the very same that Horace addressed to the bore who
attacked him in the Via Sacra?

Interpellandi locus hic erat; Est tibi mater?
Cognati, queis te salvo est opus?

And think of the London cockney's prefix of the letter h to innocent
words beginning with a vowel having its prototype in the speech of the
vulgar Roman, as may be seen in the verses of Catullus:

Chommoda dicebat, siquando commoda vellet
Dicere, et hinsidias Arrius insidias.
Et tum mirifice sperabat se esse locutum,
Cum quantum poterat, dixerat hinsidias...

Hoc misso in Syriam, requierant omnibus aures...
Cum subito affertur nuncius horribilis;
Ionios fluctus, postquam illue Arrius isset,
Jam non Ionios esse, sed Hionios.

--Our neighbors of Manhattan have an excellent jest about our crooked
streets which, if they were a little more familiar with a native author
of unquestionable veracity, they would strike out from the letter of
"Our Boston Correspondent," where it is a source of perennial hilarity.
It is worth while to reprint, for the benefit of whom it may concern,
a paragraph from the authentic history of the venerable Diedrich
Knickerbocker:

"The sage council, as has been mentioned in a preceding chapter,
not being able to determine upon any plan for the building of their
city,--the cows, in a laudable fit of patriotism, took it under their
peculiar charge, and as they went to and from pasture, established paths
through the bushes, on each side of which the good folks built their
houses; which is one cause of the rambling and picturesque turns and
labyrinths, which distinguish certain streets of New York at this very
day."

--When I was a little boy there came to stay with us for a while a young
lady with a singularly white complexion. Now I had often seen the masons
slacking lime, and I thought it was the whitest thing I had ever looked
upon. So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime. I t