that if proceed to disguise it so that its own mother would hardly know it." Which last advice she reinforces by instancing the case of the knave of hearts who was so sorely punished for his theft, because the tarts he had stolen were found in his possession "just as they had left the hands of the royal pastry-cook,' whereas it is a "moral certainty King Arthur, who stole the peck of barleymeal to be converted into a bag-pudding, had been charged with the theft he "would have drawn himself up to his full height, smote himself upon his royal breast, and proclaimed: The barley was mine! If any one doubts it, there is the pudding!' And all the world would have been forced to admit that the goodly king was as clever as he was virtuous."' I candidly confess I will not regret having hereby proclaimed my obtuseness, if any one will show me in the said article any one important point I may have missed, any connecting link that may have escaped me, and which would reconcile the end with the beginning; for, the interest I felt, in common with many, in the subject and in its treatment by the fair writer, was thoroughly genuine. ALES. "Valete et plaudite."-Augustus. "Clasp my hand, my dear friend, I die." -Alfieri. "It is small, very small" (clasping her neck). Anna Boleyn. "I shall be happy."-Archbishop Sharp. "Independence forever."-Adams. "It is the last of earth."-J. Q. Adams. "I have sent for you to see how a Christian can die.”—Addison to Lord Warwick. "Don't let that awkward squad fire over my grave."-Burns. "In te speravi, ne confundar in æternum." Bishop Abbot. "I must sleep now."-Byron. "Let the earth be filled with His glory." -Bishop Broughton. "Come, Lord Jesus."-Burkitt. "I thank God I was brought up in the Church of England."-Bishop Gunning. "God will save my soul."-Burghley. "Give Dayrolles a chair."-Chesterfield. "What, is there no bribing death?"— Cardinal Beaufort. II. "Don't let poor Nellie starve."-Charles "Remember" (the charge to Archbishop Juxon to bid Charles II forgive his father's murderers).-Charles I. "Lord, receive my spirit."-Cranmer. "I have loved God, my Father, and liberty."-De Stael. "Thy will be done."-Donne. "God bless you, my dear."-Dr. Johnston to Miss Morris. "All my possessions for a moment of time."-Elizabeth. "Lord, take my spirit."-Edward VI. "Let the earth be filled with His glory." -Earl of Derby. "A dying man can do nothing easy."Franklin. "There is not a drop of blood on my hands."-Frederick V. "Lord, receive my spirit."-Ferrar. "What I cannot utter with my mouth, accept, Lord, from my heart and soul."F. Quarles. "Let the light enter."-Goethe. "Be serious."-Grotius. "We are all going to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company."-Gainsborough. Lord, receive my spirit."-G. Herbert. "And is this death."-George IV. "God preserve the Emperor."-Haydn. "The artery ceases to beat."-Haller. "Monks, monks, monks."-Henry VIII. Lord, make haste."-H. Hammond. "Lord, receive my spirit."-Hooper. "I wish the true principles of government carried out, I ask no more."-Harrison. "I resign my soul to God; my daughter to my country."-Jefferson. "This day let me see the Lord Jesus.". Jewell. "Don't give up the ship."-Lawrence. "Cease now."-Locke to Lady Masham, who was reading a psalm. "Let me die to the sounds of delicious music."-Mirabeau. "Let me hear those notes so long my solace and delight."-Mozart. "Head of the army."-Napoleon. "I thank God I have done my duty."Nelson. "Is this your fidelity ?"-Nero. "I go to God and Saviour."-P. Heylyn. "It matters little how the head lieth." -Raleigh. "My days are past as a shadow that returns not."-R. Hooker. "I pray you see me safe up, and for my coming down let me shift for myself."-Sir Thomas More on the scaffold. "Precious salvation."-Sir J. Stonehouse. "In me behold the end of the world with all its vanities."-Sir P. Sydney. "I'm shot if I don't believe I'm dying." -Thurlow. "In tuas manus, Domine."-Tasso. "I have endeavored to do my duty."Taylor. "O Lord, forgive me specially my sins of omission."-Usher. "It is well."-Washington. "I feel as if I were myself again.". Walter Scott. THOS. CLEPHANE. CINCINNATI, O. A NOTEWORTHY COLLOQUIALISM. On both sides of the Atlantic, as I believe, such verbs as to ache, to itch, are often used colloquially in a transitive sense. My finger itches me," and "my head aches me, are expressions common enough about Philadelphia, and I have often heard them, or their like, from English people. But they have scarcely found any place in literary English. Of course, the word me is not needed in either of the above-quoted sentences. It is possible to regard this me as a dative. The old Latin grammars used to give a list of verbs, "to favor, please, trust, or their contraries, to threaten, obey *** heal, hurt, or marry," which are followed by the dative. But this me is not a It is interesting to note the appearance in our own time of a fresh contribution to the literature of the "last man." This time it is a prose sketch entitled "The Last Days of the Earth," by Camille Flammarion, coming three-quarters of a century-lacking one decade-after Tom Hood's poem, "The Last Man." The author's theory of the destruction of all terrestrial life is as follows: The sun, the source of all light and all heat, radiating perpetually without moment's cessation in the centre of cold, obscure and empty space, slowly lost the calorific power, which caused the earth to live; so the globe finally becomes only a tomb bound in ice and snow. a Later on a sort of comes, or dependent theory of the extinction of human life, but less general in its application, is introduced as follows: The achievements of science, art and industry had during several centuries been applied to raising all the joys of life to their maximum of intensity. Electricity, perfumes, music, kept the senses in a state of overexcitement, so that under the brilliant light of enchanting nights, as beneath the veiled shadows of the day, the moon's system could no longer find a moment's rest, and about their twenty-fifth year men and women dropped dead of total exhaustion. The date of the final extinction of the human race is fixed about A.D. 2,200,000, or more than one hundred thousand after years the sites of all the great cities of the world have been buried under the ice. The closing scene of the human drama is enacted among the ruins of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, overlooking a silent and endless plain. Here Omegar ard Eva, his wife, the last man and woman, one after the other, fall asleep "while the powdery snow continues to fall on the entire surface of the earth." The desolation of the picture is momentarily relieved by the appearance of Omegar's faithful dog, who bounds joyfully upon the scene, only to mourn over the motionless, snow-enshrouded forms of his master and mistress. The perusal of the close of the sketch, so full of poetic quality and so suggestive as a word-picture, leaves one almost overcome by a strange lethargic influence, an effect due, perhaps, to its richness in imaginative material. The reader is referred to the Contemporary Review of April, 1891. ΜΕΝΟΝΑ. REPLIES. Opera Dates (Vol. vii, p. 19).—Two of these "operas" are oratorios: "Naaman' and "Joshua." The former is by Costa (words by W. Bartholomew) and was produced at and composed for the Birmingham (Eng.) festival of September, 1864; the latter is Handel's, and was first produced at Covent Garden Theatre, London (Eng.), in March, 1748. "La Nonne Sanglante" is an opera, but it is hardly fair to call it Scribe's, it being the joint work of Delavigne and Scribe, from Lewis' "Monk;" it was brought out in Paris in the fall of 1854. Auber's "Masaniello," or "La Muette de Portici," was first played at Drury Lane, London (Eng.), in May, 1829, and Peter Winter's "Sänger und Schneider,' at Munich, in 1820. BROOKLYN. ALAMIRE. "Cental" Weight. In 1878, the millers of Great Britain assembled, to form themselves into an association. But, says the Secre 66 tary's report, no sooner was there a conference held than it was discovered that the members could not make themselves intelligible to each other. Each district appeared to carry on its business in a manner peculiar to the locality; some members spoke of loads, others of quarters, bushels, sacks or bags; some used terms of capacity or measure when they really meant weight, and those weights varied in almost every county. In fact, there were nearly twentyeight different modes of buying and selling corn, besides a variety of ways of disposing of flour, meal, and other products of manufacture." No wonder they set about reforming so delightful a state of things, and succeeded in getting the "Cental, or New Hundredweight" (that is, a hundredweight weighing 100 lbs., not 112), approved of by H. M. in council. At the same time they resolved on other reforms; but, with the exception of the Cental, the new weights were to retain their old names; for, said the Secretary, "with our insular dogged obstinacy, we refuse the, to us, seemingly barbarous phraseology of millier, quintal, myriagram, kilogram, hectogram, dekagram, gram, decigram, centigram, and milligram, and prefer our pound, stone, hundredweight and Jos. E. ton." Mackerel Skies (Vol. vii, p. 10).-The sailor's proverb runs : "Mackerel skies and mares' tails NEW YORK CITY. This term refers to the speckled or blotched appearance of the cirro-cumulus formation of clouds, just as the fish itself gets the name through Romance forms from Latin macula, spot, blot, on account of its markings. The word was applied in Latin to spots on an animal, as in the "Eneid," Lib. i, l. 323, where Venus describes her fictitious sister as "succinctam pharetrâ et maculosae tegmine lyncis.' French maquereau is applied to reddish spots on the human skin as well as to the fish. Mackerel sky does not seem at all far fetched when compared with mares' tails, Moltke's Birthday (Vol. vii, pp. 9, etc.). Another birthday puzzle similar to that of Von Moltke came to my notice this spring. An old lady, now living in Connecticut, was born on Easter Sunday, March 29, 1807, and in all her eighty-four years of life, the anniversary is said never to have fallen upon an Easter until the present year. The range of possibility is so small for this to occur that it seems almost incredible, but it is said to be true. NEW YORK CITY. M. C. L. The chroniclers inform us that this great strategist was born October 26, 1800, consequently his birth occurred on Sunday. It may interest "Philadelphian" to know (if he has not already made the calculation) that Von Moltke's birthday fell upon Friday, in the year 1804, 1810, 1821, 1827, 1832, 1838, 1849, 1855, 1860, 1866, 1877, 1883 and 1888, and upon Sunday in 1800, 1806, 1817, 1823, 1828, 1834, 1845, 1851, 1856, 1862, 1873, 1879, 1884 and 1890. Either the Count's memory was seriously impaired or he has been erroneously reported on this subject. GERMANTOWN, PA. CONVERSE CLEAVES. Poets Laureate (Vol. vi, pp. 261, etc.).Henry VII of England would appear to have had two poets laureate: John Skelton, tutor to Prince Henry, and Bernard André, In the year 15S8 a book was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth by Timothy Bright, which he called "An Art of Short, Swift, and Secret Writing by Character." This sys tem of shorthand had no alphabet, and consisted of long tables of words which had to be got by heart by the learner. J. Willis, in 1600, says of "Bright's Shorthand:" "It requires so much understanding and memory, that few of the ordinary sort of people could attain to the knowledge of it." Such being Mr. Willis' opinion, he published a system of his own, in which he used a certain mark for each letter of the Floyd Ireson (Vol. vii, p. 9).-A lady of Marblehead, Mass., thus demolishes the Floyd Ireson tradition: "An old lady of Lynn told me one day that there are some facts that very few people know concerning that episode. She said that her mother knew Floyd, and from him had the truth. There had been a storm, and Floyd had had trouble with some drunken sailors; and they, hastening into the town full of revenge, heard of the wreck of the rival fishing boat, and, seeing their opportunity, immediately spread the report of Ireson's seeing, scoffing at and leaving the sinking wreck. The bad tale spread rapidly, and the sweethearts and wives of the drowned sailors were ready for Ireson when he came into town; and mad with grief they tarred and feathered and rode him in a cart. He could never clear his name of the lie, and never looked a man in the face again until his death, which soon followed; for the innocent man could not bear the scorn of his townspeople. That takes the romance from the fine poem, but there really seems a finer pathos in the truth, doesn't there ?" NEW YORK. M. C. L. Deer Isle (Vol. vii, p. 17).-The township (here called a town) of Deer Isle, Hancock county, Maine, includes, besides the island of the same name (ten miles long), several smaller islands, one of which, Little Deer Island, is three miles long, lying N. W. and S. E., and is generally barren and stony. The lighthouse, on Pumpkin Island, is in lat. 44° 18' 32" N., long. 68° 44′ 34′′ W. Another lighthouse on Mark's Island is known as Deer Island light. On the south shore of the main island is Green's Landing, a village celebrated for its granite quarries. The main port of the island is at Southeast Harbor. Another settlement is at North west Harbor, on which is the village of Deer Isle, the two harbors, or bays, nearly cutting the island in two. Oceanville is a village on Whitmore's Neck, a peninsula which becomes an island at high tide. Crockett's Cove, Burnt Cove, and Small Cove, are little ports on the main island. At Southwest Harbor is the considerable village of South Deer Isle. Sunset is another pleasant seaside village. The township supports one weekly newspaper. exploitation of summer boarders are the The fisheries, the granite business, and the leading industries. MAINE. ISLANDER. Authorship of Quotation Wanted (Vol. vi, P. 307). When Bishop Berkeley said, "There was no matter," And proved it-'twas no matter what he said; They say his system 'tis in vain to batter, Too subtle for the airiest human head; And yet who can believe it? I would shatter Gladly all matter down to stone or lead, Or adamant, to find the world a spirit, And wear my head, denying that I wear it. (Opening stanza of Canto Eleventh of "Don Juan," Lord Byron.) The theory referred to is laid down in Bishop Berkeley's "Principles of Human Knowledge." Perhaps the "pious Cloyne" is better known as the author of two treatises on the use of tar-water, the latter of which, "Farther Thoughts on Tar-water,' peared in 1752, but a few months before his death. ΜΕΝΟΝΑ. Coronets (Vol. vii, p. 9).—The coronet things," is a British Baron's coronet; that with the "four large billiard-ball-looking with three more or less accurate Maltese crosses, etc.," is a British Ducal coronet. R. G. B. NEW YORK CITY. [We have been favored with a reply to the same effect by E. P.] The first of the baubles described by your correspondent is evidently an English Baron's coronet; the second, with only three visible Maltese crosses (indeed, if the engraving be done accurately, it is probable that he only sees the whole of one and the |