“The second turn to the _west_,” she told us. In our part of the county we do not often think of the points of the compass. “The second turn on your left,” it would have been.
This is one of our older districts, and a certain amount of old-fashioned speech remains. Many persons still speak of _ninepence_ (twelve and a half cents) and a _shilling_ (sixteen and two-thirds cents). A High School pupil (one of the many boys who walk three or four miles in to our Town, in all weathers, to get their schooling) brought in some Mountain Ash berries to the botanical class. _Round-Tree berries_, he called them, and the master was puzzled, until he realized that this meant _Rowan Tree_, and that the name had come down straight from the boy’s English forefathers, who picked the rowan berries by their home streams.
[Illustration: THE PEACEFUL, PRETTY HAMLET OF UPPER BRIDGE]
All through our county, and in our Town itself, among the homelier neighbors, many of the old strong preterites, which have become obsolete elsewhere, are still in use. “I _wed_ the garden,” for “I _weeded_,” “I _bet_ the carpet”; _riz_ for _raised_, _hove_ for _heaved_; and among our old established families of substance you may still hear _shew_ for _showed_ and _clim_ for _climbed_.
“I _clim_ a little ways up into the rigging,” one of our magnates said to me this very week, speaking of an adventure of his seafaring youth.
After the Revolution certain of the unfortunate Hessians drifted to the southern part of our county, and being stranded, poor souls, they made the best of it, settled and married. They named our town of Dresden. The Theobalds come from this Hessian stock, the Vannahs, who started as Werners, the Dockendorffs, and we have a precious although extremely local seashore name, _Winkiepaw_, which began life as Wenckebach. But the adaptation of surnames is in process all around us. Uriah Briery’s people used to be _Brieryhurst_; and Samuel Powers has told me that his grandfather wrote his name in “a queer Frenchy sort of way, he spelled it _de la Poer_”(!) The Goslines, of whom we have a good sized family, were _du Gueslins_, not long since, and Alec Duffy, who sounds entirely Irish, was born _Alexis D’Urfeé_.