Page:A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland - Johnson (1775).djvu/392

 The conversation of the grows every day less unpleasing to the ; their peculiarities wear fast away; their dialect is likely to become in half a century provincial and rustick, even to themselves. The great, the learned, the ambitious, and the vain, all cultivate the phrase, and the  pronunciation, and in splendid companies  is not much heard, except now and then from an old Lady.

There is one subject of philosophical curiosity to be found in, which no other city has to shew; a college of the deaf and dumb, who are taught to speak, to read, to write, and to practice arithmetick, by a gentleman, whose name is. The number which attends him is, I think, about twelve, which he brings together into a little school, and instructs according to their several degrees of proficiency.