NEW ENGLANDERS.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 1519, 12 February 1886, Page 3

NEW ENGLANDERS.

New England was essentially the home of the Puritan Fathers, who fled here tor peace and liberty, and carried with them much of that love of peace and hatred of despotism, with at the same time the narrow religious prejudices and even bigotry whichforyears distinguished the " Yankee people," and to this day are among the most marked features of some parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts. A " Deacon" from Bhode Island, or a "select man" from Martha's Vineyard, would not in most circles be accepted as the type of great liberality. To this day the New Eoglanders are impressed with many of the features of that Old England from whence their ancestors came 200 or more years ago. They live in a soil not the most bounteous, and under a climate only a trifle better than that from which their forefathers fled. Hence they are frugal, prosperous, keen in business—possibly a little sharp—intelligent, educated, and generally speaking imbued with a contempt for shams, show, extravagance, or anything which savours of foreign ways and foreign wastefulness. New England really constitutes the brains of America, and Boston, though jocularly styled the " hub of the universe," has some right to be considered so from the Transatlantic point of view, Words peculiar to New England are often called " Americanisms." In reality most of them are Old England words in common use at the time these people left for the New "World, but are now only seen in Shakespeare and the writers of the peroid. The very word •' Yankee," now vaguely applied to all Americans of the Northern States, shows the light in which the early dwellers in New England were looked on by the aborigines. It is, in fact, the Indian's corruption of the term Anglais, or Englishman, applied to the first settlers by the Frenchmen of the neighbouring country of Canada. Hence, Yengees, Yenghes, Yanghis, Yankees. It was used at least as early a* 1713 by one Jonathan Hastings, a farmer, who applied it to his cider and other wares as expressive of his intention that the world should believe that they were something very superior. At least such is the legend. It is interesting, and may possibly even be true.— From the Countries of the World.