Dec. 17.—My recent diary entry about the shepherd's count" aroused a lot of interest among friends and I have received many letters asking for further explanations. Incidentally I made the mistake of writing fore-leg instead of hind-leg as the meaning of "Jigget," but that does not matter. One learned friend to whom Erse, Gaelic, Cornish and Breton dialects are as an open book, tells me that "Bumfit" (15) is the equivalent of the Welsh "Pymtheg" ie. Pimp (5) plus deg (10), but I am inclined to think that there was a lot of punning or playing on words among our ancient shen-herds, since the same number in certain dialects becomes "huan" or "blum." This is how I see the picture. The shepherds knew two certain facts: they had five fingers on each hand and every animal had four legs: hence they made the tally four times five (a score). To memorize the count round their fingers twice was difficult, so they took the sheep's legs as the basis of their calculations. Thus, a shepherd would say, "I start with the two fore-feet and the warning numbers are Pimp (5) and Deg or Diz (10): I then go to the two hind-feet which are Bumfit, the near-hind and Jigget which represents the last "leg" in the count. Having been trained as an accountant, I cen easily picture these illiterate men taking words as they found them and twisting them to meet their own devices. One shepherd would come to another and ask how many stray sheep he had seen in a certain valley; the other had counted nineteen on his fingers; so he thought of the third foot of the sheep (Bumfit) and replied, "pedder-bumfit" which meant, "add four digits to the third leg of the count": answer 19.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.