el at seeing a sad thing, but to the sadness of the thing
itself. We do not now say a person is pitiful when he feels sorry for
some one, but we speak of a "pitiful sight" or a "pitiful plight."

The word _pity_ itself is used still in both ways, subjectively and
objectively. A person can feel "pity," and there is "pity" in the
thing for which we feel sorry. This is the sense in which it is used
in such expressions as "Oh, the pity of it!"

The word _hateful_ once meant "full of hate," but came to be used for
the thing inspiring hate instead of for the people feeling it. So,
_painful_ used to mean "painstaking," but of course has no longer
this meaning.

One very common way in which words have changed their meanings is
through the name of one thing being given to another which resembles
it. The word _pen_ comes from the Latin _penna_, "a feather;" and as
in olden days the ordinary pens were "quills" of birds, the name was
very good. We still keep it, of course, for the steel pens and gold
pens of to-day, which we thus literally speak of as feathers. _Pencil_
is a word with a somewhat similar history. It comes from the Latin
_penicillus_, which itself came from _peniculus_, or "little tail," a
kind of cleaning instrument which the Romans used as we use brushes.
_Pencil_ was originally the name of a very fine painter's brush, and
from this it became the name of an instrument made of lead which was
used for making marks. Then it was passed on to various kinds of
pencils, including what we know as a lead-pencil, in which, as a
writer on words has pointed out, there is really neither lead nor
pencil.

The word _handkerchief_ is also an interesting word. The word
_kerchief_ came from the French _couvre-chef_, "a covering for the
head." Another similar word is one which the Normans brought into
England, _curfew_, which means "cover fire." When the curfew bell rang
the people were obliged to extinguish all lights and fires. The
"kerchief" was originally a covering for the head. Then the fashion
arose of carrying a square of similar material in the hand, and so we
get _handkerchief_, and later _pocket-handkerchief_, which, if we
analyse it, is rather a clumsy word, "pocket-hand-cover-head." The
reason it is so is that the people who added _pocket_ and _hand_ knew
nothing of the real meaning of _kerchief_.

There are several words which used to mean "at the present time" which
have now come to mean "at a future time." This