1), which the critics have all thought meant simply blood-stained.

Miss Baker, in her _Glossary of Northamptonshire Words_, first pointed out that 'bolter' was peculiarly a Warwickshire word, signifying to clot, collect, or cake, as snow does in a horse's hoof, thus giving the phrase a far greater intensity of meaning.

And Steevens, too, first noticed that in the expression in _The Winter's Tale_ (Act III, Sc.

3), 'Is it a boy or a child ?'--where, by the way, every actor tries to make a point, and the audience invariably laughs--the word 'child' is used, as is sometimes the case in the midland districts, as synonymous with girl; which is plainly its meaning in this passage, although the speaker has used it just before in its more common sense of either a boy or a girl." In fact, the _English Dialect Dictionary_ cites the phrase "is it a lad or a child ?" as being still current in Shropshire; and duly states that, in Warwickshire, "dirt collected on the hairs of a horse's leg and forming into hard masses is said to _bolter_." Trench further points out that many of our pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the formation of our early English, subsequently dropped out of our usual vocabulary, and are now to be found only in the dialects.

A good example is the word _eme_, an uncle (A.S.