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 was deef and dumb. I did b'gosh. Here I've sot, and sot, and sot, a-bustin' musketeers and wonderin' what was ailin' ye. Fust I thot you was deef and dumb, then I thot you was sick or crazy, or suthin', and then by and by I begin to reckon you was a passel of sickly fools that couldn't think of nothing to say."

Nothing so strikingly demonstrates the presence and the power of a distinctive style as its complete metamorphosis of any foreign substance which is cast into it. A play of Molière, for example, cast into the distinctive Anglo-Irish style of Synge and his friends becomes not a French play with Irish costume but an Irish play with an Irish soul. Mr. Untermeyer, a clever mimic, has recently demonstrated that many of our contemporary American poets possess distinguishable personal styles, by casting into them and transforming an ode of Horace, so that it reappears as recognizably the work of Mr. Sandburg or Mr. Frost—to mention two of his successful metamorphoses. We have therefore a variety of American styles; and that these are American you can judge by the shock that you feel in finding strains of Mr. Lindsay's "Congo" in the latest long poem of Mr. Masefield.

In similar fashion an ingenious person could doubtless translate, say "Pilgrim's Progress," into a half dozen of our rustic sectional idioms, that of Tennessee, or Maine, or Georgia; and, if he were sufficiently ingenious, the version would be stamped not merely with the obvious marks of dialectal difference but also with subtler distinctions in the