the benefit of Mr. Worden's own instruction, I could do better, and,
generally, my knowledge of the classics went beyond that of Jason's. The
latter's English, too, was long a source of amusement with us all, though
my grandfather often expressed strong disgust at it. Even Col. Follock did
not scruple to laugh at Newcome's English, which, as he frequently took
occasion to say, "hat a ferry remarkaple sount to it." As this peculiarity
of Jason's extended a good way into the Anglo-Saxon race, in the part of
the country in which he was born, it may be well to explain what I mean a
little more at large.

Jason was the son of an ordinary Connecticut farmer, of the usual
associations, and with no other pretension to education than such as was
obtained in a common school, or any reading which did not include the
Scriptures, some half-dozen volumes of sermons and polemical works, all the
latter of which were vigorously as well as narrowly one-sided, and a
few books that had been expressly written to praise New England, and to
undervalue all the rest of the earth. As the family knew nothing of the
world beyond the limits of its own township, and an occasional visit
to Hartford, on what is called "election-day," Jason's early life was
necessarily of the most contracted experience. His English, as a matter of
course, was just that of his neighbourhood and class of life; which was
far from being either very elegant or very Doric. But on this rustic,
provincial, or rather, hamlet foundation, Jason had reared a superstructure
of New Haven finish and proportions. As he kept school before he went to
college, while he was in college, and after he left college, the whole
energies of his nature became strangely directed to just such reforms of
language as would be apt to strike the imagination of a pedagogue of his
calibre. In the first place, he had brought from home with him a great
number of sounds that were decidedly vulgar and vicious, and with these in
full existence in himself, he had commenced his system of reform on other