ging full-grown,
like Pallas Athene, from the laboring brain of some Olympic Sophister.
Here in the quiet of our study in the country, we wonder if the boys
continue as in our day to "create a shout," instead of "making a call,"
upon their lady acquaintances,--if they still use "ponies,"--if they
"group," and get, as we did, "parietals" and "publics" for the same.

The police courts contribute their quota. Baggage-smashing,
dog-smudging, ring-dropping, watch-stuffing, the patent-safe men, the
confidence men, garroters, shysters, policy-dealers, mock-auction Peter
Funks, bogus-ticket swindlers, are all terms which have more or less
outgrown the bounds of their Alsatia of Thieves' Latin and are known
of men.

Even the pulpit, with its staid decorums, has its idioms, which it
cannot quite keep to itself. We hear in the religious world of
"professors," and "monthly concerts," (which mean praying, and not
psalmody,) of "sensation-preaching," (which takes the place of the
"painful" preaching of old times,) of "platform-speakers," of
"revival-preachers," of "broad pulpits," and "Churches of the Future,"
of the "Eclipse of Faith" and the "Suspense of Faith," of "liberal"
Christians, (with no reference to the contribution-plates,) of
"subjective" and "objective" sermons, "Spurgeonisms," and "businessmen's
meetings." And we can never think without a smile of that gifted genius,
whoever he was, who described a certain public exercise as _"the most
eloquent prayer ever addressed to a Boston audience."_ He surely created
a new and striking idiom.

The boys do, as Young America should, their share. And the sayings of
street urchins endure with singular tenacity. Like their sports, which
follow laws of their own, uninfluenced by meteorological considerations,
tending to the sedentary games of marbles in the cold, chilly spring,
and bursting into base-and foot-ball in the midsummer solstice, strict
tradition hands down from boy to boy the well-worn talk. There are still
"busters," as in our young days, and the ardent youth upon floating
cakes of ice "run bendolas" or "kittly-benders," or simply "benders." In
different latitudes the phrase varies,--one-half of it going to Plymouth
Colony, and the other abiding in Massachusetts Bay. And this tendency to
dismember a word is curiously shown in that savory fish which the
Indian christened "scup-paug." Eastward he swims as "scup," while at the
Manhattan end of the Sound he is fried as "po