sentence, ahterwurds has the accent on the first syllable; at the end of one, on the last; as, ‘ah’terwurds he tol’ me,’ ‘he tol’ me ahterwurds’.’  The Yankee never makes a mistake in his aspirates. U changes in many words to e, always in such, brush, tush, hush, rush, blush, seldom in much, oftener in trust and crust, never in mush, gust, bust, tumble, or (?) flush, in the latter case probably to avoid confusion with flesh.  I have heard flush with the e sound, however.  For the same reason, I suspect, never in gush (at least, I never heard it), because we have already one gesh for gash. A and i short frequently become e short. U always becomes o in the prefix un (except unto), and o in return changes to u short in uv for of, and in some words beginning with om. T and d, b and p, v and w, remain intact.  So much occurs to me in addition to what I said on this head in the preface to the former volume.

Of course in what I have said I wish to be understood as keeping in mind the difference between provincialisms properly so called and slang. Slang is always vulgar, because it is not a natural but an affected way of talking, and all mere tricks of speech or writing are offensive.  I do not think that Mr. Biglow can be fairly charged with vulgarity, and I should have entirely failed in my design, if I had not made it appear that high and even refined sentiment may coexist with the shrewder and more comic elements of the Yankee character.  I believe that what is essentially vulgar and mean-spirited in politics seldom has its source in the body of the people, but much rather among those who are made timid by their wealth or selfish by their love of power.  A democracy can afford much better than an aristocracy to follow out its convictions, and is perhaps better qualified to build those convictions on plain principles of right and wrong, rather than on the shifting sands of expediency.  I had always thought ‘Sam Slick’ a libel on the Yankee character, and a complete falsification of Yankee modes of speech, though, for aught I know, it may be true in both respects so far as the British provinces are concerned.  To me the dialect was native, was spoken all about me when a boy, at a time when an Irish day-laborer was as rare as an American one now.  Since then I have made a study of it so far as opportunity allowed.  But when I write in it, it is as in a mother tongue, and I am carried back far beyond any studies of it to long-ago noonings in my father’s hay-fields, and to the talk of Sam and Job over their jug of blackstrap under the shadow of the ash-tree which still dapples the grass whence they have been gone so long.