of solid and highly respectable habits around the domestic hearth.  Knowing perfectly how to spell, they never dreamed anyone would suspect them of ignorance.  They called themselves as their forefathers were called, that is to say, Wooster, or just as Worcester is pronounced; though a Yankee schoolmaster tried for a whole summer to persuade our hero, when a child, that he ought to be styled Wool-ston.  This had no effect on Mark, who went on talking of his uncles and aunts, “Josy Wooster,” and “Tommy Wooster,” and “Peggy Wooster,” precisely as if a New England academy did not exist on earth; or as if Webster had not actually put Johnson under his feet!

[Footnote 2:  Absurd and forced as these strange appellations may appear, they are all genuine.  The writer has collected a long list of such names from real life, which he may one day publish—­Orchistra, Philena, and Almina are among them.  To all the names ending in a, it must be remembered that the sound of a final y is given.]

The father of Mark Woolston (or Wooster) was a physician, and, for the country and age, was a well-educated and skilful man.  Mark was born in 1777, just seventy years since, and only ten days before the surrender of Burgoyne.  A good deal of attention was paid to his instruction, and fortunately for himself, his servitude under the eastern pedagogue was of very short duration, and Mark continued to speak the English language as his fathers had spoken it before him.  The difference on the score of language, between Pennsylvania and New Jersey and Maryland, always keeping in the counties that were not settled by Germans or Irish, and the New England states, and through them, New York, is really so obvious as to deserve a passing word.  In the states first named, taverns, for instance, are still called the Dun Cow, the Indian Queen, or the Anchor:  whereas such a thing would be hard to find, at this day, among the six millions of people who dwell in the latter.  We question if there be such a thing as a coffee-house in all Philadelphia, though we admit it with grief, the respectable town of Brotherly Love has, in some respects, become infected with the spirit of innovation.  Thus it is that good old “State House Yard” has been changed into “Independence Square.”  This certainly is not as bad as the tour de force of the aldermen of Manhattan when they altered “Bear Market” into “Washington Market!” for it is not a prostitution of the name of a great man, in the first place, and there is a direct historical allusion in the new name that everybody can understand.  Still, it is to be regretted; and we hope this will be the last thing of the sort that will ever occur, though we confers our confidence in Philadelphian stability and consistency is a good deal lessened, since we have learned, by means of a late law-suit, that there are fifty or sixty aldermen in the place; a number of those worthies that is quite sufficient to upset the proprieties, in Athens itself!