lead-pencil, &c. The peculiarity of Germans pronouncing in their
mother tongue s like sh when it is followed by a t or
p, and of Germans in southern Germany often also final
s like sh, naturally produced in their American
jargon such results as shplit, shtop, shtraight, shtar,
shtupendous, shpree, shpirit, &c; ish(is), ash(as), &c.; and, by
analogy led to shveet(sweet), schwig(swig), &c. We need not
notice, however, more than these freaks of the
German-American-English of the present poems, as little as we
need advert to simple vulgarisms also met with in England, such
as the omission of the final g in words terminating in
ing (blayin' - playing; shpinnen' - spinning; ridin',
sailin', roonin', &c.). We must, of course, assume that the
reader of this little volume is well acquainted both with English
and German.

The reader will perceive that the writer has taken another
flight in "Hans Breitmann's Christmas," and many of the later
ballads, from what he did in those preceding; and exception might
be taken to his choice of subjects, and treatment of them, if the
language employed by him were a fixed dialect - that is, a
language arrested at a certain stage of its progress; for in that
case he would have had to subordinate his pictures to the narrow
sphere of the realistic incidents of a given locality. But the
imperfect English utterances of the German, newly arrived in
America, coloured more or less by the peculiarities of his native
idiom, do not make, and never will make a dialect, for the simple
reason that, in proportion to his intelligence, his
opportunities, and the length of time spent by him among his new
English-speaking countrymen, he will sooner or later rid himself