University of Virginia Library

15. CHAPTER XV.
THE MAKING OF A LANGUAGE.

There are very pretty walks, in different directions,
near St. Bart's School. One of the most beautiful of
these, up hill and down, and with many windings
among barberry-bushes and other shrubs and low trees,
was, in spite of its beauty, very little used; for it was
only a short lane off West Road, not leading through
to any road, and was in one place — beyond the houses
— wet, where it met a marsh. Just beyond that marsh
it came to an end, near a disused brick-kiln.

It is not always bright weather, even in the wholesome
country; and those rains had apparently now set
in which are said to “fill the streams before winter.”
It was on a day which gave little encouragement to
walking (for it had rained a good deal) that there were
sitting on a smooth rock, under very thick evergreen
branches, at the side of this lane, a girl and a boy.
The grass which bordered the roadway was, by this
time of the year, scanty and weak, and the leaves of
most trees were much thinned out; but everywhere,
unless under the covert where the children sat, was
moist.

The boy we have seen so often before that we know
him at once as Antony Brade: the girl, who was
dressed in plain black, was pale, with an interesting

and thoughtful face, but brightened now, as by the
boy's company. She was rather older and taller than
her companion, — possibly wiser also, for, at least just
now, she talked less and listened more. Now and then
she leaned forward, — sometimes leaving her seat and
walking a step or two into the road, and looked each
way. Then she took her old position and listened,
smiling, and as if ready for her turn to speak. Young
Brade was beating the damp ground with a stick, — his
hat lying meanwhile beside him on the rock, — and all
the time he was speaking in rather a low voice, but
earnestly, and, as it would seem, upon the same subject
which had occasioned so much speculation and discussion
among people, young and old, of his acquaintance,
— his origin or condition.

“Oh! I can do it!” he said. “But it'll be pretty
hard, sometimes; but you'll see. Some things I don't
like, — if I could only have your house for home: it's
just as if I'd got no home and no family.”

The girl very cheerfully answered, tossing her head
with each merry exclamation of contempt: —

“Pooh! pooh! pooh! pooh! pooh! poo-ooh! Master
Antony, never mind! it'll come right, by and by, please
God;” (and she seated herself on her seat, adjusting her
dress). “It won't be long, first, and then you can be
as happy as you please, Master Antony Brade.”

This she said with a tone of good cheer, that comes
by natural gift to womanhood, young or old. The
boy's spirits seemed more like the sky and the weather:
still, as we have already seen, it was not another's
strong spirit or cheery voice that was needed to give
him strength. He turned to her, with a pretence of
frowning, and raised his stick, threateningly: —

“Don't call me that! don't call me Master Antony!”
he said drolly. “When we are all by ourselves, I am
sure you might call me `Anty' or `Tony.'”

“No, no!” she said, shaking her head and smiling
as she did so, and with a very lively and determined
tone, indeed, “No!”

Then she added, with a very ceremonious voice and
manner, “When would I do it at all, Master Antony,
if not when we are all by ourselves? Come! we mustn't
lose our time. Isn't it good we've got our bower?”
(spreading her arms, but rather narrowly, as if to avoid
shaking down the wet, and looking about upon their
quarters), “and we are able to meet, so that any
way we'll not forget each other.” This, too, she said
mirthfully, emphasizing rather excessively the last
words. Here she turned her face round in front of his,
putting up her chin pertly, and receiving in return
a little slap upon the cheek. So their narrow retreat
was pretty merry and comfortable.

“Well, we'll begin our language right off,” said
Antony, in his enthusiasm throwing up the stick with
which he was beating the earth so high that he struck
one of the heavy, low-hanging, evergreen boughs, and
brought a whole shower of raindrops down upon them
both. At this both burst into happy laughter, and he
shook his curly head, and she wiped her dress with a
handkerchief.

“Suppose,” said he, as older philosophers have
made their suppositions, sometimes stretching very far
out into moving causes and into the strengths and
fastnesses of nature, and sometimes, too, bringing
great discoveries to men, — “suppose we should shake
all the wet down, and then there wouldn't be any more
to come.”

Here was a philosophical principle involved which
the girl seemed to regard with little respect. “Why,
you foolish boy!” she said, laughing heartily again,
“wouldn't you get all wet yourself, shaking it down?
and wet all our bower, and our seats? What a boy
you are!”

His foolish supposition coming back to him in this
shape of absurdity, he could not help laughing again;
so, under those trees, damp as things were all about,
was as cheery a place as under many a well-shingled
or well-slated shelter from the weather. The girl ran
quickly forward to make her usual reconnoissance, and
back again, and, having seated herself as before,
smoothed out her lap, and said with great spirit: —

“Now let's begin! Who's got any paper?” and she
felt, long and thoroughly, in the only pocket she had,
without bringing out any thing more to the purpose
than a crumpled bit, on which were what looked like
sums in Arithmetic. This, they both said, would not
do; and Antony kept on going through his pockets,
which he had already gone through more than once;
but his search resulted in his finding nothing more than
a few small rolls and foldings and crumples of paper, —
all of which, he said, were precious, as having parts of
a WORK in Greek and Latin on them, — and a single
brown scrap, in which were wrapped up three or four
small stones, a few black seeds or berries, and a tangle
of twine. He restored the first, carefully and ceremoniously,
to his waistcoat, and folded and squeezed up the
latter again, and put it back into his coat, and then
they both agreed that perhaps they could find a place
on the rejected sum-paper, and ended by saying that
“there was plenty of room, and it would do splendidly.”

Now they spread it all out, and, after hastily looking
it all over, set themselves to their work; and with what
spirit they went about it! One corner of Brade's
pocket furnished a pencil, caught in inextricable
meshes of pack-thread, and released after Alexander
the Great's fashion.

Nothing (unless looks) was ever so touching, so moving,
so overcoming, so full of life and kinship as words;
and how hard it is for the fire of life to die out of them!
Language — any worthy and noble language that we
know — is so great and wonderful that men of long
thought and study are arguing, in books, whether
speech is a gift straight from God, or was felt out and
followed on by men's own wit and need. But who has
not, with some school-crony, knowing or not knowing
what Cadmus did for Greece, boldly made up a language
and sported it sometimes in the hearing of
grown-up men; and initiated, with some show of form,
a playmate or two into its secrets; dropped some of its
words upon the pages of a letter sent home, and left
them unexplained, — his heart beating pretty high, and
his eye glistening at thought of what conjectures would
be there indulged, about the very deep things that
school boys get into! Let our readers who are curious
in philepy, or speech-liking, look closely to the doings
of these two intelligent children of different sexes.
Here they will be likely to get as reasonable and fair
an account of the way in which languages originate, as
from the twins of Psammitichus, who βέχος ἐφόνησαν
(made the sound of the goat) or made their first utterance
in Scythian, or those of the Scottish king who
pushed straight out into the world of speech with well-formed
Hebrew.

Antony Brade and the young girl, his companion, were
now set down to the making of a language. A difficulty
presents itself before they begin.

“There are as many words in the English language,”
said Antony, “as one hundred thousand! we couldn't
make as many as that;” and he laughed.

“Why, we don't want as many as that, to say all
we've got to say,” said the girl; and she belonged to
the sex who make the most use of that and other languages,
and might be expected to know. “We could
say every thing with only a few.”

“How many should we have to have, Kate?” asked
Brade, — “two hundred? We couldn't get along with
two hundred, could we, if people use a hundred thousand?”

“Let's begin,” said Kate; “only you must remember
and call me `Miss Ryan.'”

“Pooh!” said Brade, at the last part of the sentence.
She looked thoughtfully at her paper.

There they sat, and did not begin. The first start
was made by Brade: —

“Let's call mud `modo,'” he proposed, working the
end of his stick in the earth, “and we must change
all the letters of the alphabet: how shall we do
that?”

“We shan't have to do that,” said Kate. “Different
languages have the same letters, and yet that doesn't
make the languages the same. If you changed all the
words as much as `modo,' you wouldn't have to change
the letters.”

“Oh, well,” said Antony, brightening up as the task
was narrowed down, “if you only want words, I know
a way Russell made when he was in the Second Form;

but then he let everybody into it at last, so that a
great many people could read it. We've got to have
one that nobody can read but just us two.”

“But we needn't do just the same that he did. How
did his way go, Master Antony?” she asked, emphasizing
the name, but looking up and smiling.

He was thinking; but, as soon as he understood what
she had just been saying, he raised his stick, which he
had still held, though no longer playing with it, and
threatened her, drawing a frown upon his face over the
smile which kept place at his roguish young mouth.
Then he came back to business.

“Oh! let me see,” said he, conning the composition
which was to be the ground on which they were to
work out their language.

“I must look out,” said the watchful girl; and made
her walk to the road, and turned her eyes up and down
it quickly, and then came quickly back.

He had been studying the written words.

“Russell's way was to leave a letter out,” said Brade.
“But I don't believe he meant it to be hard; and, if a
word was a long word, he'd leave out two. But anybody
could find that out. Suppose we should leave
out half a word?”

“Well, don't let's begin to write, until we've chosen
what we'll have; because we haven't got much paper,”
said Kate. “Take a word.”

Antony looked up into the air, as if words and
ideas floated there, and before long had got a word.

“`Therefore' 's a good word. Suppose I want to write
to you, `therefore I can't come.' I'd write `fore,' but
then,” continued he, hesitating, — “you can't take half
of `I'” —

“Make it small,” said Kate, — “make it little `i,' with
a dot: `fore (little) i, not me.' There! they couldn't
make that out.”

“Now, suppose I want to say, `I've got another ball,'
or `I've caught a muskrat,' — little `i'-`e' (how far
have we got?) `I've-got-a-muskrat,' — I, — no, little
i-e, — how are you going to divide `got'? — leave the
t on? — No: I'll tell you. He had another way. It
was: Take a letter from one place and put it in another
place; take a hind-letter and put it in front. He left
his book down for anybody to find out; but nobody
but me ever found out, and I never told anybody. It's
a real good way. Let's try that.”

Now that things looked more definite, the paper
came forth and was put to use. Antony had a pencil,
and Kate Ryan wrote for both. Brade proposed
the making of a regular letter, which was to run in this
way: —

“`Dear Kate, I got your letter, and was very glad
when I got it. I got it last evening. I am glad to
hear that all are well. I went a trapping, and I'” —

“Not so fast!” said Kate, whose fingers went pretty
well, considering the dampness. “There! now you've
got enough for a beginning. There! you can take
that” (tearing off what was already written). “Let's
keep `THE LANGUAGE' all on a separate piece.
You read.”

To this arrangement the boy assented with great
readiness.

“You must only say `Kate,' not `dear Kate.'”
(“Well!” said he, as if he did not care to argue that
point any more). “`Ekat,'” — she continued, writing.

“Let's always put `I' on to another word,” suggested
Antony, following his paper.

“Well,” she continued, “`Ekati-tgo-'” (following his
dictation, which he said was like Cæsar's, — only he
wanted a few more scribes) “`ryou — rlette — dan —
swa — yver — dgla — nwhe — itgo — ti.'”

They did not get along quite so fast as we have gone,
for they made and corrected a mistake or two; but this
was the result which they came to, at the end of the
first sentence; and there they stopped a little while,
to compare notes and exult. They were satisfied with
the look of it. They longed to put the acquired language
to use in their correspondence; and, after the
first flush of excitement over their success, went on to
translate the whole of Antony's composition into their
own private language. The preliminary `Ekati' they
changed, on Kate's urgency; and at last the whole work
stood complete before their eyes in this shape: —

“Smis nryai tgo ryou rlette dan swa yver dgla nwhe
itgo ti. imdgla ot rhea ttha lal ear lwel. itwen gatrappin
dnai tcaugh eon tmuskrai. lwil eb ta rbowe sa lusua.
B. A.”

And then one thing struck one of the authors, — Kate
Ryan: “Where a letter is doubled in a word, like
two p's in `trapping,' why can't we leave out one? and
so in `letter'? I'm afraid somebody will guess `trapping'
and `letter.'”

In the making of so important a thing as a language,
the girl seemed to think the world interested, and
likely to be curious. Young Brade accepted at once
the proposition, and the dangerous `t' and `p' were
taken out, leaving the words to which they belonged
much less suspicious-looking and much less liable

to detection, now that the letters had been taken
away.

“Now,” said Antony, “we must both have copies
exactly alike, so that we can remember, and we can put
a particular mark at those two words, so as to show
that the letters were left out on purpose. Now can't
we do any thing else to it?”

The makers examined the effect of several proposed
improvements; but, because these did not make either
The Language any better or the secrecy any greater,
they were all abandoned; and it was resolved that, for
the present, the language should be tried as it was.
Brade, with many bows and much ceremony, and with
some laughter, practised the “Smis Nrya” with which
the letter opened, at first joining to these words others
in the ordinary vernacular, but at length turning all
into the Secret Language which had just come into
being, as “Smis Nrya, who od uyo od?”

Now they did not believe that anybody in the whole
world could make it out; and Brade would not fear to
leave a piece lying on the ground so that anybody could
see it.

“Wouldn't it be good,” he asked, “if one of those
great men that read inscriptions, or the Postmaster-General,
should try a piece of it?”

These words apparently reminded Kate of her watchfulness,
for she hurried to the road, looking longer than
she had yet looked toward the highway.

“There's something stopping away over on the hill,”
she said, hurrying back. “Now we must be quick.
Have you made a new one? If we could rub out one
t and one p from this, it would do just as well as writing

it over. Quick! quick! quick!” and she spread out
the paper.

With all the hurry, Antony took occasion to show a
little learning, acquired, as we may suppose, not long
before in the class-room, and still fresh to him, that
“the Ancients used to write with one end and rub out
with the other, — vertere sty” —

Kate unceremoniously broke in, bursting into a laugh
(children in good spirits are so ready to laugh): —

“Never mind the Ancients!”

The Third-Form boy took good-naturedly this slight
upon his Latin, and, turning his pencil, began to rub
out the objectionable letters with its india-rubber; and,
while he was busy with that work, Kate, finding the
freest and cleanest part of her paper, made a copy for
Antony, keeping for her own the first.

Then going into the road, and looking each way, as
before, she called hastily to him: “There! go you right
in back there, into the `cuddle'” (this very likely was
their private name for some inner retreat or fastness),
and as she spoke she pushed him inwards from the
road. “Mr. Parmenter's coming!”

“I don't mean to hide!” said the boy, positively.

“You must!” she answered, with equal positiveness;
— “but I can't stay!” — and immediately set out in
the direction of the main road, and of what had given
her the alarm, walking steadily and quietly, without
once looking back or turning her head.

She bowed quietly on meeting a vehicle in which
were Mr. Parmenter and another person, to whom, as
they drove slowly, Mr. Parmenter was pointing out
with his whip, to the prospect on the grounds at the

side. It was not likely that they would observe the
young girl in black, who brushed the moist bushes in
turning out for them. After passing them, in like manner
she kept her way without turning, as wisely as any
woman who wished not to show curiosity nor to attract
attention.