Page:The Life of the Fields, Jefferies, 1884.djvu/161

Rh They had no opportunities of polishing their discourse, or their literary compositions. At this hour, in remote parts of the great continent of America, the pioneers of modern civilization may be said to live amid mediaeval surroundings. The ,vast forests and endless prairies give a romance to common things. Sometimes pathos and sometimes humour arises in the log-cabin, and when the history of these simple but deeply human incidents comes to be told in this country, we are moved by the strange piquancy of event and language. From the new sounds and scenes, these Anglo-Saxons hewing a way through pine and hemlock now, as their ancestors hewed a way into England, have added fresh words and phrases to our common tongue. These words are not slang, they are pure primeval language. They express the act, or the scene, or the circumstance, as exactly as if it was painted in sound. For instance, the word "crack" expresses the noise of a rifle; say "crack," and you have the very sound; say "detonation," and it gives no ear-picture at all. Such a word is "ker-chunk." Imagine a huge log of timber falling from rock to rock, or a wounded opossum out of a tree, the word expresses the sound. There are scores of such examples, and it is these pure primitive words which put so much force into the narratives of American pathos and humour.

Now, the dwellers in our own villages and country places in their way make use of just such expressions, that is, of words which afford the ear a picture of the act or circumstance, hieroglyphs of sound, and often, both in language and character, exhibit a close parallelism with the Californian miners. Country people