Page:Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau.djvu/52

28 as would be likely to wear out one book before they would be prepared for the abstruser parts of grammar. Ahem!

As no one can tell what was the Roman pronunciation, each nation makes the Latin conform, for the most part, to the rules of its own language; so that with us of the vowels only A has a peculiar sound. In the end of a word of more than one syllable it is sounded like &quot;ah,&quot; as pennah, Lydiah, Hannah, etc., without regard to case; but &quot;da&quot; is never sounded &quot;dah&quot; because it is a monosyllable. All terminations in es, and plural cases in os, as you know, are pronounced long, as homines (hominese), dominos (dominose), or, in English, Johnny Vose. For information, see Adams' &quot;Latin Grammar,&quot; before the Rudiments.

This is all law and gospel in the eyes of the world; but remember I am speaking, as it were, in the third person, and should sing quite a different tune if it were I that made the quire. However, one must occasionally hang his harp on the willows, and play on the Jew's harp, in such a strange country as this.

One of your young ladies wishes to study mental philosophy, hey? Well, tell her that she has the very best text-book that I know of in her possession already. If she do not believe it, then she should have bespoken another