"What wad my father say if I were to marry a man that loot himsel' be
thrashed by Tommy Potts, a great supple wi' a back nae stiffer than a
willy brand? . . . When one comes to close quarters wi' him he's but a
dugon."

Halliwell and Wright give _dogon_ as a noun, and mark it Anglo-Norman,
but they apparently know it only from Jamieson and the supplement to
Jamieson, where _dogguin_ is cited from Cotgrave as meaning "a filthie
old curre," and _doguin_ from Roquefort, defined by "brutal, currish"
[hargneux]. A word with the same orthography, _doguin_, is still used in
French for puppy. It is of course a question whether the noun _dogon_
and its French antecedents are connected with the American verb
_dog-on_. It is easy to conceive that such an epithet as _dogon_ might
get itself mixed up with the word dog, and so become an imprecation. For
instance, a servant in the family of a friend of mine in Indiana,
wishing to resign her place before the return of some daughters of the
house whom she had never seen, announced that she was going to leave
"before them dog-on girls got home." Here the word might have been the
old epithet, or an abbreviated participle. _Dogged_ is apparently a
corruption of dog-on in the phrase "I'll be dogged." I prefer _dog-on_
to _dogone_, because in the dialect the sense of setting a dog on is
frequently present to the speaker, though far enough away from the
primitive sense of the word; perhaps.]




CHAPTER II.

A SPELL COMING.