Page:New Brunswick Magazine Issue 1.djvu/387

meaning "an opening over a hay-rack, through which the hay is put in." It was fitted, I presume, with a lid, or trap-door, which, being closed, shut off the hay-mow from the stable below it.

Abat-faim: This is given in the same dictionary as an expression in familiar speech, to denote "a substantial, large joint of meat,"—that is, something by which hunger (faith) is abated, or kept off.

Here are five compound nouns, in each of which the force of the prefix abat is clearly to impart the sense of a barrier, a defence, a protective structure. And there are other similar compounds almost as good for the purpose of our argument. To me, this evidence is quite conclusive in favor of abat-eau as the original and true form of the name given by the Acadians to the structure by means of which they shut out from their marshes the swelling tides of the Bay of Fundy. Many of their descendants, as well as many English-speaking people who now live in the vicinity of the dykes they built, drop the initial vowel of the word abat-tau, and call a dyke of this special kind a "bato" placing the accent upon the long final syllabic, and making the preceding vowel so brief in utterance that its sound might be expressed in writing by an a, an e an i, an o, with perfect indifference. That M. Diéreville should have expressed that sound by an o, and have written the full word, which he heard uttered quickly, "aboteau" cannot surprise us. Or, that the word, as it stands in his text, is merely the result of the error of a printer who mistook a defectively-shaped a for an o, is surely, a very reasonable supposition.

It really is a very strange thing that the word, either as it is spelled in Diéreville's volume, or as aboideau is included in none of the French dictionaries, except, as a friend has informed me, in the supplement