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He had espoused, too, with all the ardor of the new settler, the several articles of political faith of his neighbors, loyalty to the State, belief in the justice and humanity of slavery and the omnipotent rights of man, white, of course, and he had, strange to say, fallen into the peculiar pronunciation of his Southern friends, dropping his final g's, and slurring his r's, thus acquiring that soft cadence of speech which makes their dialect so delicious.
I attended for some years, and even now I cannot recall without a smile the absurd incompetency of every one connected with the institution and their utter ignorance of the art of imparting knowledge to children. At home I had picked up that grand art of reading, and went to school to learn the other two R's, with any trifle that I might come across floating around promiscuously.
Kerreri, which the Arabs pronounce with a prolonged Doric or Northumbrian roll of the r's, as though there were at least a dozen of them in the word, is upon the margin of a belt of rough gravel, stone, and low detached hills that extend to the southward, to Omdurman and beyond.
"A Frenchwoman, maybe, by the way she rolls her r's." I pricked up my ears. The same thought occurred at that instant to both Mr. Royce and myself. "Does she resemble Miss Holladay?" he asked quickly. "Miss Holladay? Oh, no, sir. She's much older her hair's quite gray."
In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith.
Certainly his consequent lack of deep root in the past and his impressionability, though limitations to his genius, make him the more typical of American intelligence. At the age of eight he was sent to the grammar school, where he remained less than a year, and then passed under the charge of Mr. George Brownell, a teacher of the three R's.
She wanted me to say she was the most tried creature since Adam. And I could not, girls I really could not. I have not the slightest doubt there have been a million women worse tried since the battle of Prague, never mention Adam. As to Amelia Bracewell, who carries her fan as if it were a sceptre, and slurs her r's like a Londoner, silly chit! I have hardly any patience with her.
One of his plans for the spiritual welfare of his scattered flock, was the holding of a series of protracted meetings at the various settlements. One of these was held at the wooden school-house of the little hamlet of Queenston. An old pensioner of the Revolutionary War had gathered a few children together and taught them their catechism, and as much of "the Three R's" as he knew.
Because we live in country towns, where the only car-gongs we hear are on the baker's waggon, and where the horses in the fire department work on the streets, is no reason why city dwellers should assume that we are natives. We have no dialect worth recording save that some of us Westerners burr our "r's" a little or drop an occasional final "g."
Of accent in his speech there was none, but Desmond's ear, trained to foreigners' English, could detect a slight Continental intonation, a little roll of the "r's," an unfamiliar sound about those open "o's" of the English tongue, which are so fatal a trap for foreigners speaking our language.
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