allowed in the North."

"That may be true," said Mr. West, "and there was in slave times a
very intimate relationship between the negro nurses and the white
children of the South. Some of our people are ready to take offense
at the suggestion that we talk negro dialect, and perhaps we would
all prefer to say that the negroes have learned to talk as we talk;
but the truth is that the negroes were brought to America chiefly as
adults; and, as is usually the case when adult people learn a new
language, they modified ours because their own African language did
not contain all of the sounds of the English tongue. Similarly we
hear and recognize the other nationalities when they learn to speak
English. Thus we have the Irish brogue, the German brogue, and the
French brogue, or dialect.

"The negro children learned to speak the dialect as spoken by their
own parents; and as a very general rule the white children learned
to talk as their negro nurses talked. So far as there is a southern
dialect it is due to the modification of our language by the negro."

"You have mentioned several things," said Percy, "that are much to
the credit of the negro who has had a fair chance to be trained
along right lines; and I think the modficaton of our language which
his presence has brought about in the South is not without some
credit. It is generally agreed that the most pleasing English we
hear is that of the Southern orator.

"Referring to social conditions, the most marked difference which I
have noticed between the North and South, and really, it seems to
me, the only difference of importance, is that the South has