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“TO THE HIGHLANDS BOUND”

Highlands and Islands, as we Scots chuckle to ourselves, is the one phrase which an Englishman cannot mispronounce. I read lately a book of Scottish travel by an American, who made my countrymen leave out their h’s like any Cockney; then I at once laid aside this writer’s observations as vain. The humblest Scot never drops an h, unless in words like hospital, which the Southron painfully aspirates in his anxiety not to be judged vulgar, as in living memory he has tacked this test of breeding on to humour and humble. More fairly we may be charged with overdoing the h sound; and there are two or three words in which we insert it: huz, for instance, said in some parts for “us.” In the game of anglicé “touch” or “tag,” my childish conception of the formula “who’s hit?” made it a participle meaning “struck” or “touched,” till I heard German children crying in like case “Ich bin es!” when I did not know how hit is the old English pronoun, preserved by Scots dialects, which are the truest copies of our national tongue.