Dryasdust puzzles and pokes for some biography of this Beodric; and repugns to consider him a mere East-Anglian Person of Condition, not in need of a biography,—whose ƿeoƿð, weorth or worth, that is to say, Growth, Increase, or as we should now name it, Estate, that same Hamlet and wood Mansion, now St. Edmund's Bury, originally was. For, adds our erudite Friend, the Saxon ƿeoƿðan, equivalent to the German werden, means to grow, to become; traces of which old vocable are still found in the North-country dialects; as, 'What is word of him?' meaning, 'What is become of him?' and the like. Nay we in modern English still say, 'Woe worth the hour' (Woe befall the hour), and speak of the 'Weird Sisters;' not to mention the innumerable other names of places still ending in weorth or worth. And indeed, our common noun worth, in the sense of value, does not this mean simply, What a thing has grown to, What a man has grown to, How much he amounts to,—by the Threadneedle-street standard or another!