Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 3.djvu/321

 us. in. APRIL sun.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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destroy all existing institutions to correct their abuses. ' Horace Greely, and train of bluelight Clayites from your State, have arrived this morn ing, and make their head- quarters at the Franklin Horace has fastened on his armor with rivet, and hammer, and the Taylor men will find him a regular Barnburner ! ' New York Herald." Under " Hunk " he gives :

" To be Hunk, i.e. all safe. From the Dutch hunk, a home, a place. Hunkers or old Hunkers Also derived from the Dutch hunk. A loca political term, originating in New York in 1844 to designate the Conservative Democrats as opposed to the young Democracy or Barnburners (q.v. ). The Hunkers themselves clung to the homestead of old principles, but unkind critics insisted that it rather meant a clinging to a large hunk of the spoils of office. Hence Hunkerism." S. S. McDOWALL.

" Hard-shells " were Baptists who helc an extreme Calvinism which led them to oppose all active measures for the conversion of the world a sect, according to Webster which numbered 40,000. The " soft-shells ' probably held more tolerant views, and both terms would easily become political.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

AMERICAN WORDS AND PHRASES (11 S iii. 48, 172, 196). Whitewash. The classic instance of the use of this word to indicate bankruptcy is in * The Pickwick Papers,' chap. xliv. Mr. Weller visits Sam in the Fleet :

said the elder Mr. Weller.
 * ' I've got sitch a game for you, Sammy,'

' ' Stop a minit,' said Sam; ' you're all vite behind.'

' That's right, Sammy, rub it off,' said Mr. Weller, as his son dusted him. ' It might look personal here, if vun valked about vith any vitevash on vun's clothes, eh, Sammy ? ' "

C. C. B.

York waggon. It is improbable that English waggons, called " York waggons " in the seventeenth century because they plied between York and London, were imported and used by New York people under the same name, as MR. MACMICHAEL suggests, ante, p. 197 : while, per contra, MR. THORNTON'S own conjecture that his "York waggon" was made at York, Pennsylvania, is probably correct.

Unfortunately, MR. THORNTON does not give the date of this phrase, but from the figures annexed to his other examples we may infer its time to be somewhere from the middle of the eighteenth century to early in the nineteenth.

I have no data at hand as to York's early manufactures, but the making of carriages

j and other vehicles is one of the busy town's chief industries to-day, and there are good reasons for inferring that the occupation began quite early enough to come within the time mentioned.

Pennsylvania, especially in its south- eastern section, was far in advance of the other colonies in the early use and manu- facture of waggons. She needed them because her roads were better and were more used. It was at York and Lancaster that Franklin gathered the waggons requisitioned for Braddock's use, and it was from Pennsylvania that the Revolutionary armies gathered most of their waggons.

It was within twenty-five miles of York, in the Conestoga valley, that about 1750 or a little later there was developed the broad-wheeled, canvas-covered freight-carrier widely known as the " Conestoga waggon," so superior for its purpose that the roads were soon crowded with these vehicles, and the records of all travellers of the day com- ment upon their great numbers, enumerating them sometimes by thousands. It cannot be supposed that York did not share in the manufacture, and probably one of these possibly of slightly variant type was the " York waggon " of the quotation.

These notable waggons in after years, when railways had superseded them in the East, became the picturesque, white-tilted " prairie schooners " in which hundreds of families were carried with all their belongings to new homes on the great plains of the far West. M. C. L.

New York.

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S STATUE IN THE ROYAL EXCHANGE (11 S. iii. 187, 230). The statue of Queen Elizabeth in the Royal Exchange is the work of Musgrave Lew- thwaite Watson (1804-47), who exhibited nineteen times at the Royal Academy and twice at Suffolk Street. He was born at Hawksdale Hall, near Carlisle. His parents ntended him for the legal profession, and articled him at the age of seventeen to a Carlisle solicitor. After two years' trifling with the pursuit mapped out for him, he eft Carlisle and made his way to the studio of Flaxman in London, taking with him

portfolio of drawings and a few models. Flaxman was attracted by a small model of

Grecian shepherdess, which he advised Watson to send to the Royal Academy. Watson's ability as a sculptor was just eginning to be recognized when death ntervened. It appears from the * Par- iculars respecting the Amount of Money