[crashryan]

The stories in this magazine are, as they used to say, "not without interest," but their languid pace works against them.

I noted one orthographic peculiarity: the past tense of "to lead," i.e. "led," is here consistently spelled "lead." The online dictionaries and grammars agree this is a misspelling, arising perhaps by association with the past tense of "to read" being "read" pronounced as "red." Or is it another common usage that's changed during the last century?

Link to the book: The Black Cat 022 - For Dear Old Yale - James Langston

[The Australian Panther]

Given that this was published in 1897, and it was a literacy magazine, the explanation would be that that was common usage at the time. An online dictionary will give current accepted usage - but if you got a dictionary published in the 19th century,you would be surprised at how much usage of many words has changed. Language is not fixed and neither are dictionaries. Which is why Shakespeare and the KIng James Bible can be almost unreadable for many today. 

Cheers!   

[Andrew999]

Now that's interesting - and Panther's right of course, language is always changing. There are many borderline words at any one time - I guess it depends a lot on how you were taught as a child.

For example, I still go to write 'lead' in the past tense but usually stop myself and change it to 'led' as that is now more common. In fact, this happened only the other day when I was writing an article.

Another is the slang word 'barmy' which my inner voice tells me to spell 'balmy'

Then there's pleaded an pled - though that might be more to do with the difference between British and Webster spellings - not to mention programme and program.

Don't get me started on the correct spelling of words like encyclop