xiii, 6.  Wells opposes this doctrine, citing a passage from Webster, as above, and also imitating his argument.  This author acknowledges three classes of pronouns—­“personal, relative, and interrogative;” and then, excluding these words from their true place among personals of the possessive case, absurdly makes them a supernumerary class of possessive nominatives or objectives! “Mine, thine, his, ours, yours, and theirs, are POSSESSIVE PRONOUNS, used in construction either as nominatives or objectives; as, ’Your pleasures are past, mine are to come.’  Here the word mine, which is used as a substitute for my pleasures, is the subject of the verb are.”—­Wells’s School Gram., p. 71; 113 Ed., p. 78.  Now the question to find the subject of the verb are, is, “My what are to come?” Ans. “pleasures.”  But the author proceeds to argue in a note thus:  “Mine, thine, etc. are often parsed as pronouns in the possessive case, and governed by nouns understood. Thus, in the sentence, ‘This book is mine,’ the word mine is said to possess book.  That the word book is not here understood, is obvious from the fact, that, when it is supplied, the phrase becomes not ‘mine book,’ but ‘my book,’ the pronoun being changed from mine to my; so that we are made, by this practice, to parse mine as possessing a word understood, before which it cannot properly be used.  The word mine is here evidently employed as a substitute for the two words, my and book.”—­Wells, ibid. This note appears to me to be, in many respects, faulty.  In the first place, its whole design was, to disprove what is true.  For, bating the mere difference of person, the author’s example above is equal to this:  “Your pleasures are past, W.  H. Wells’s are to come.”  The ellipsis of “pleasures”, is evident in both.  But ellipsis is not substitution; no, nor is equivalence.  Mine, when it suggests an ellipsis of the governing noun, is equivalent to my and that noun; but certainly, not “a substitute for the two words.”  It is a substitute, or pronoun, for the name of the speaker or writer; and so is my; both forms representing, and always agreeing with, that name or person only.  No possessive agrees with what governs it; but every pronoun ought to agree with that for which it stands.  Secondly, if the note above cited does not aver, in its first sentence, that the pronouns in question are “governed by nouns understood,” it comes much nearer to saying this, than a writer should who meant to deny it.  In the third place, the example, “This book is mine,” is not a good one for its purpose.  The word “mine” may be regularly parsed as a possessive, without supposing any ellipsis; for “book,” the name