rgie." And apropos of him,
let us note a curious instance of the tenacity of associated ideas. The
street boys of our day and early home were wont to term the _hetairai_
of the public walks "scup." The young Athenians applied to the classic
courtesans the epithet of [Greek: saperdion], the name of a small fish
very abundant in the Black Sea. Here now is a bit of slang which may
fairly be warranted to keep fresh in any climate.

But boy-talk is always lively and pointed; not at all precise, but very
prone to prosopopeia; ever breaking out of the bounds of legitimate
speech to invent new terms of its own. Dr. Busby addresses Brown, Jr.,
as Brown Secundus, and speaks to him of his "young companions." Brown
himself talks of "the chaps," or "the fellows," who in turn know Brown
only as Tom Thumb. The power of nicknaming is a school-boy gift, which
no discouragement of parents and guardians can crush out, and which
displays thoroughly the idiomatic faculty. For a man's name was once
_his_, the distinctive mark by which the world got at his identity.
Long, Short, White, Black, Greathead, Longshanks, etc., told what a
person in the eyes of men the owner presented. The hereditary or
aristocratic process has killed this entirely. Men no longer make their
names; even the poor foundlings, like Oliver Twist, are christened
alphabetically by some Bumble the Beadle. But the nickname restores his
lost rights, and takes the man at once out of the _ignoble vulgus_ to
give him identity. We recognize this gift and are proud of our
nicknames, when we can get them to suit us. Only the sharp judgment of
our peers reverses our own heraldry and sticks a surname like a burr
upon us. The nickname is the idiom of nomenclature. The sponsorial
appellation is generally meaningless, fished piously out of Scripture or
profanely out of plays and novels, or given with an eye to future
legacies, or for some equally insufficient reason apart from the name
itself. So that the gentleman who named his children One, Two, and
Three, was only reducing to its lowest term the prevailing practice. But
the nickname abides. It has its hold in affection. When the "old boys"
come together in Gore Hall at their semi-centennial Commencement, or the
"Puds" or "Pores" get together after long absence, it is not to inquire
what has become of the Rev. Dr. Heavysterne or his Honor Littleton Coke,
but it is, "Who knows where Hockey Jones is?" and "Did Dandy Glover
really die in