BY THE SAME AUTHOR. Old Country Life. Large Crown 8vo, 10s. 6d. Historic Oddities and Strange Events. Crown 8vo, 6s. Freaks of Fanaticism. Crown 8vo, 6s. Songs of the West : Traditional Ballads and Songs of the West of England, with their Traditional Melodies. Parts I., II., and III., 3s. each; Part IV., 5s. Complete in one Vol., French Morocco, gilt edges, 15s. Yorkshire Oddities and Strange Events. Crown 8vo, 6s. In the Roar Of the Sea : A Tale of the Cornish Coast. Crown 8vo, 6s. Jacquetta ,

When the writer was a parson in Yorkshire, he had in his parish a blacksmith blessed, or afflicted—which shall we say?—with seven daughters and not a son. Now the parish was a newly constituted one, and it had a temporary licensed service room; but during the week before the newly erected church was to be consecrated, the blacksmith’s wife presented her husband with a boy—his first boy. Then the blacksmith came to the parson, and the following conversation ensued:— Blacksmith: “Please, sir, I’ve

The tourist on the Rhine, as a matter of duty, visits in Cologne three points of interest, in addition to providing himself with a little box of the world-famous Eau , at the real original Maria Farina’s factory. After he has “done” the Cathedral, and the bones of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, he feels it incumbent on him to pay a visit to the horses’ heads in the market-place, looking out of an attic window. Fig. 2. — THE HORSES’ HEADS, COLOGNE. Myths attach equally to the Minster, the Ursuline

When Tristram and Ysonde were driven from the Court of Mark, King of Cornwall, they fled to a forest of “holts and hills,” and there found and inhabited an “erthe house” which “etenes, bi old dayse had wrought;” that is to say, a house constructed by the giants of old. King Mark came that way one day when hunting, and looking in saw Ysonde asleep, with a patch of sunlight about to fall on her closed eyes through the tiny orifice which alone served as chimney and window to the “erthe house;” and,

I had let my house. Two days after, I received the following letter:— “Friday. “ My Dear Sir , “In the best bedroom is a four-post bed. Mrs. C. assures me that it will be quite impossible for her to invite any friend to stay with her unless the four-poster be removed, and its place occupied by a brass or iron double-tester. Four-posters are entirely exploded articles. I will trouble you to see to this at your earliest convenience this week. “Yours faithfully, “C. C.” Of course I complied. Two ye

“Please, sir, the rats be a rampagin’ in the lumber-room as makes the blood curl!” For fifty years I had never been into that lumber-room. It is situated up a steep flight of steps in the back kitchen, and had once been inhabited by a button-boy. Here is an extract from my grandmother’s account-book for the year 1803:— Verily prices have risen since 1803. However, to return to the four-pounder. He inhabited this room some ninety years ago: then it was abandoned, finally locked up, and the key lo

Some years ago I happened to be at that most picturesque old city of Würzburg on a showery May market-day. The window of my hotel commanded the square. The moment that the first sprinkle came over the busy scene of market women and chafferers, the whole square suddenly flowered like a vast garden. Every woman at her stall expanded an enormous umbrella, and these umbrellas were of every dye—crimson, blue, green, chocolate, and—yes, there was even one of marigold yellow, under which the huckstress

A white marble sarcophagus occupies the centre of one of the rooms on the basement of the Capitoline Museum in Rome. The cover has been taken off and a sheet of glass fastened over the coffin, so that one can look in. The sarcophagus contains the bones and dust of a little girl. Her ornaments, the flowers that wreathed the poor little head, are all there, and by the side is the child’s wooden doll, precisely like the dolls made and sold to-day. Fig. 33. — DOLL OF IVORY, FROM THE CATACOMB OF ST.

Of the three factors that go to make up man—body, intellect, and the spiritual faculty, the last has been allowed somewhat to fall into neglect in the present age, when special stress has been laid on the education and development of the intellect. Nevertheless it is a factor that must not be ignored, and it is one that is likely to revenge itself for neglect by abnormal action. In the Middle Ages it was the reverse; under the preponderating influence of the Church, the spiritual faculty was cul

“I love a ballad in print, a’ life,” said Mopsa, in the “Winter’s Tale,” and the clown confessed to the same liking. “I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.” Fig. 37. — BALLAD SINGER, FROM A BROADSIDE. In 1653, Dorothy Osborne tells Sir William Temple that she has received from her brother a ballad “much older than my ‘Lord of Lorne,’ and she sends it on to him.” Would that she had told us more about it.

There is a curious little work, the contents of which are said to have been collected by Hans Sachs, the Nuremberg cobbler and master-singer, in 1517. This curious book was reprinted several times in the seventeenth and early part of the eighteenth century, but it is now somewhat scarce. It was issued without place of publication or publisher’s name, in small form without cover. The book pretends to have been prepared by Hans Sachs for his private use, that he might make merriment among his frie

Among our national institutions there is one—the gallows—to the roots of which, in a remote past, antiquarians have, to the best of my knowledge, not dug, and which they have not laid bare. Possibly this omission is due to the fact that it is not an institution of which we are proud; possibly also to the fact that it is an institution which we keep as clear from touching as we well can. Nevertheless, the origin and original signification of the gallows are too curious to be neglected. The origin

In the village churchyard where as a boy I often played, is a tomb, built up to the height of about five feet, with a slate slab let into the south face, on which is an inscription. In this slab is a hole, and it used to be said among the village boys that any one who looked in through this hole and knocked at the slate would see the dead man within open his eyes. Often have I and my brother peeped in and knocked, but the experiment failed, because, when the eye was applied to the hole, it exclu

It is really remarkable how many customs are allowed to pass without the idea occurring as to what is their meaning. There is, for instance, no more common usage of everyday life than that of salutation by raising the hat, or touching the cap, and yet, not one person in ten thousand stops to inquire what it all means—why this little action of the hand should be accepted as a token of respect. Raising the hat is an intermediate form; the putting up the finger to the cap is the curtailed idea of t

A special Presentation Edition, bound in white buckram, with extra gilt ornament. 7 s. 6 d. The First Edition was sold on publication, and two further large Editions have been exhausted. The Fourth Edition is Now Ready. Gladstone. THE SPEECHES AND PUBLIC ADDRESSES OF THE RT. HON. W. E. GLADSTONE, M.P. With Notes. Edited by A. W. Hutton , M.A. (Librarian of the Gladstone Library), and H. J. Cohen , M.A. With Portraits. 8 vo. Vol. IX. 12 s. 6 d. Messrs. Methuen beg to announce that they are about

‘Mr. Kipling’s verse is strong, vivid, full of character.... Unmistakable genius rings in every line.’— Times. ‘The disreputable lingo of Cockayne is henceforth justified before the world; for a man of genius has taken it in hand, and has shown, beyond all cavilling, that in its way it also is a medium for literature. You are grateful, and you say to yourself, half in envy and half in admiration: “Here is a book ; here, or one is a Dutchman, is one of the books of the year.”’— National Observer.

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[1] Sacrifices of the same kind were continued. Livy, xxii. 57: “Interim ex fatalibus libris sacrificia aliquot extraordinaria facta: inter quæ Gallus et Galla, Græcus et Græca, in Foro Boario sub terra vivi demissi sunt in locum saxo conseptum, jam ante hostiis humanis, minime Romano sacro, imbutum.” [2] Jovienus Pontanus, in the fifth Book of his History of his own Times. He died 1503. [3] These cauldrons walled into the sides of the churches are probably the old sacrificial cauldrons of the T