hard to believe that he could read. Then this man, who was himself in the dark, blundered, as I feel, into some most clear shinings of light, though it may not be to say very much for them to tell you that I had long groped for them, and been very glad to find them.

I have, however, read some Friesic of sundry oldnesses, being so lucky as to have one of the 250 copies of the Gospel of St. Matthew in Ñew LandFriesic, printed for H.H. Prince Lucien Buonaparte, for whom it was written by the learned J. H. Halbertsma, and the first share (all yet printed) of his great work, the Lexicon Frisicum, kindly given to me by his son, Mr. Tialling Halbertsma, and I have some Friesic laws and poetry, and wordbooks of Friesic old and new, but I could not write a book in Friesic and cheat Mr. Tialling Halbertsma to take it for a fair shape of his mother tál. As to the jol (yól), our yule, Outzen, in his Glossarium der Friesischen Sprache, gives four pages, large square size, to the word in its sundry Teutonic forms, and gives sundry foregiven opinions that it was the sun, or a year-sweep of the earth round the sun, or the so-seeming yearcourse of the sun or other revolution, or ring of time, and says that in Saterland Friesic the word is used for a wheel, and if Saterland was so called from the god Sater, Seater (Time), as the land where he was honoured, as Frea was honoured in Freastland, it is markworthy, since the Saxon figure of Seater holds the yol as a wheel in his hand. The forger, if he could read German, might have read Outzen, but he gives the yól as a wheel without any wavering. The older form of yól was however geol.

Did the forger invent or find in a book the yule alphabet in which he writes his book? He seems to have written it so long that it had become to him a ready handwriting, but no pen, cut in the shape of the Eastern or European pens, would give its strokes. The paper of his books has been said to be of cotton, and then to have been

made by a now - standing firm in Maestricht, and latterly to have been no such thing, but Chinese paper. Did he write with a Chinese writingpencil? As to Therp, Thorp, most of us know that Nelson was born at Burnham Thorp, but far fewer may know what a thorp at first was. In Dutch and German the word, as Dorp or Dorf, means simply a village, and yet the unlearned forger clearly understood its first meaning, and how it differed from a knoll.

The English version is from a Dutch one, and shunts the word Therp. The Friesic makes Trâst to say to a man, as to his house,

"Did it not stand then on a Knoll or Therp?" "Uppen, Nol jeftha Therp." The English is, "Did it not stand on a knoll?"

Then the man says afterwards, “I could not alone make there a Therp" (not a Nol); but the English says a Hillock, by which it must mean a Knoll-a natural Hillock-the only thing it had named.

As to Frea, the lamps are most fitting for her worship if she is Light, but while he gives marks that befit her as Light, he does not know, or does not say that she is Light, and so far seems to be uncrafty. He also falls in with our Saxon Chronicle, in the taking of Woden, forefather of the Saxon kings, as a hero other than the god Woden. He seems to me to give us the true first meaning of a gossip, in "Thju, gå-moder." The gâ-mother, the village mother, by whom he means the village midwife. The Gâ, or Gau, or Gae, being the Friesic and Saxon community, answering more or less to our parish, and thence we see that a gossip was a gasib, a parish kinswoman or acquaintance. I have seen some things from other such little sparks of light, and should wish that it could be shown from the forger's old books what legends or histories afforded him his matter, and what other grains of gold might be found in their heaps of sand.

W. BARNES.