Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 1.djvu/51

 ii s. i. JAN. is, mo.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

reaching which town the travellers appear to have struck off to join the direct road from Sholapur to Poona. Mrs. Fletcher records that they had left Sholapur at 1 o'clock that '; morning, and that they had 40 miles more to do before 10 that night ; so that, appa- rently, the town where they were to make their next halt was Indapur, which is about the distance named from Ahirbabulgaon, and about 80 miles by that road from Sholapur. From Indapur to Poona the distance is 84 miles ; and as Mrs. Fletcher says " we go Dak (having Hamals posted, so as to proceed without stopping)," it is

Erobable that the travellers reached Poona ite at night on 27 September. Mrs. Fletcher had noted in her diary " I enjoy this rough marching " ; but the fatigue of the forced march was evidently too great for her enfeebled body, and within a few days on 4 Oct., 1833 he died, of cholera, at Poona, and there was buried. a

I have searched the pages of The Colombo Journal in vain for any reference to the death of the gifted woman whose glowing lines recording the impressions of her too brief sojourn in Ceylon had appeared only a few weeks earlier in the columns of that paper ; not even among the extracts of Indian news is the sad event recorded. As The Colombo Journal was almost as much a magazine of literature as a newspaper, this silence is to me incomprehensible.

DONALD FERGUSON.

" YON " : ITS USE BY SCOTSMEN.

AMONG -English men of letters there seems to be a persistent impression that Scotsmen say "yon " when they would more accurately express their meaning by using " this " or " that." In the sixth chapter of ' Lavengro ? Borrow is prompted to illustrate what is supposed to be the national practice the moment he is able to look over the Tweed into Scotland. He assumes that a Northum- berland fisherman will speak after the manner of his neighbours in Berwickshire, and in reporting an interview with such an eidolon for interlocutor he manages the Lowland Scotch fairly well. He describes himself as being " extended on the bank of a river," to which he pays a graceful and eloquent tribute, and he adds that several robust fellows were near him, " some knee-deep in water, employed in hauling the seine upon the strand." Everything shows that the river was at hand, and to be alluded to, therefore, in terms of its close proximity, and yet the

writer makes his fisherman say, when telling" him its name, " Yon river is called the Tweed ; and yonder, over the brig, is Scot- land.":

A second standard example of the same curious notion regarding Scottish phraseology occurs in a familiar story of the late Alexan- der Baird, a member of a famous stock of Glasgow ironmasters. According to the legend, Mr. Baird once visited Egypt with some friends, and was characteristically amazed at the wasteful extravagance that must have gone towards the making of the Pyramids. The popular version of the story may be inaccurate, but it is not with- out point and a measure of verisimilitude. In presence of one of the portentous monu- ments, the ironmaster, with his keen sense of values, is said to have summarized his view of an ancient speculator in the withering exclamation, " Whatna fule sank his money in yon ? ?1 So far as one's recol- lection of the narrative goes, this appeal was made while the practical critic and his friends'were at the base of the venerable structure, and not after they were holding a discussion over their experiences in their hotel or in the course of their homeward journey.

One of the most recent illustrations of the assumption that " yon n is the provincial Scotsman's regular demonstrative occurs in, the prefatory note to Mr. Noyes's mono- graph on William Morris in the " English Men of Letters." When Morris, according to Miv Noyes, was once in Scotland, he was taken by a clergyman to see his church, and immediately arrested the attention of an observer with a quick eye for personal dis- tinction. The " verger " saw the poet,, and instantly perceived that he was in the presence of one who was " not an ordeenary man. n Naturally, he was eager for informa- tion, and, plucking his minister violently by the sleeve, kept vehemently asking, " Wha 's yon ? Wha 's yon ? " The three, we may presume, were close together, Morris perhaps being a few steps in front and just beyond earshot, when the ardent Scotsman thus darted gratuitous queries at his ecclesiastical superior. We are, indeed,, explicitly informed that the alert official started the cry just " as Morris entered his church.' 2 Thus no room is left for doubting as to the significance intended to be attached to the man's use of the pronominal term.. Plainly he said " yon,' ? and not " that,'* because he was a Scotsman regarding whom an Englishman was able to tell a diverting: story.