Page:Notes and Queries - Series 10 - Volume 11.djvu/110

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [io s. XL JAN. so, im

CHRISTOPHER LTJDWICK. An account of him is printed in The Massachusetts Spy, 12 Aug. and 2 Sept., 1801. He is described as " Baker General of the Army of the U.S., during the Revolutionary War." He was born 17 Oct., 1720, at Giessen Hessen in Darmstadt ; fought against the Turks, 1737-40 ; was in Prague during the siege, 1741 ; went to the East Indies in Admiral Bosca wen's squadron ; emigrated to Phila- delphia, 1753, and set up his business of family gingerbread baker in Lsetitia Court in that city, 1754 ; married a widow, Catharine England, 1755, but left no issue. During the War of Independence he induced a number of Hessians to desert. He is said to have died in June, 1800 (it may have been a year earlier or later), and was buried in the Lutheran Churchyard at Germantown. RICHARD H. THORNTON.

36, Upper Bedford Place, W.C.

" GOOD-FORS." I do not see any mention of this compound word in the ' N.E.D.' It is a colloquialism much in use in South Africa, and probably in other parts of the world as well. I encountered it first on the voyage to Cape Town. A " good-for " is a card with the two words printed at the top, under which you write any order of wine or spirits, followed by your signature. Every three or four days the steward hands you your bill of extras, together with the " good-fors " as vouchers. The same rule obtains in the Colonial hotels and restaurants, where these receipts have been current for fully thirty years. When I was in the public service at Kimberley, " good-fors " fre- quently found their way into court as acknowledgments for debt, and on such occasions they were always treated by the resident magistrate as liquid documents, like promissory notes and I O U's. The word is constantly met with in Cape papers.

N. W. HILL. New York.

THACKERAY ANECDOTE. I have just read the interesting little critique on Thackeray's works, ante, p. 18, and send the following anecdote.

Thackeray once desired to succeed Card- well as M.P. for the city of Oxford, and when returning from his canvass said, "What do you think, Cardwell ! Not one of your constituents ever heard of me and my writings." He prefaced " constituents " with a strongish adjective.

Strange, if true. They must have been starving in the midst of plenty.

JOHN PICKFORD, M.A.

" Now OR NEVER." The earliest instance of this phrase given in the ' N.E.D.' (s.v. ' Now,' 8) is dated 1560. An earlier example occurs in a letter of Sir John Paston to his brothers John and Edmund, 13 June, 1475, in Gammer's edition (1900) iii. 137 :

" Wherffor, for yowr better speede, I lete you weete that Heugh Beamond is deed : wherffor I wolde ye had hys roome nowe or never, iff ye can brynge it abowt."

L. R. M. STRACHAN.

Heidelberg.

WHYTE DE MALLEVILLE. In Lenotre's ' Romances of the French Revolution,' recently published by Mr. Heinemann, it is related that among the prisoners released on the taking of the Bastille none produced such a sensation as did an unknown personage of immense age, a " white apparition of a man," who was lodged at brewer Santerre's house, and forthwith paraded through the town to receive the " fraternizations " of the mob, and blink in the glare of a Paris July. With palsied head shaking to and fro, and snowy beard reaching to his knees, in second childishness and mere oblivion, the strange object looked more like a corpse than a living being. He was wholly in- sensible to the popular acclamation, and, when made to understand ~that the crowd desired his name, announced himself as " le major de 1'immensite." Further in- quiry proved him to be Jacques Frangois Xavier de Whyte de Malleville.

Naturally, one thinks of another Whyte Melville, and wonders whether there may be any connexion between the two.

PHILIP NORTH.

[A query founded on M. Lenotre's book appeared ante, p. 8.J

CHINESE PRONUNCIATION. The Chinese language has been compared to a hedgehog, bristling with difficulties at all points. I venture to draw attention to two curious features of Chinese speech, which affect the pronunciation of proper names, and should therefore interest public speakers and others.

The first peculiarity is the increasing palatalization of the letter k, when followed by i, so that it sounds like our ch in ' 'church." The consequence is that in a name like Kin-chau (an important place) the two syl- lables now sound as if they began with the same letter, " Chin cho." This perversion originated in the capital, which by its in- habitants is called " Pay-ching." It is now affecting the spelling of Chinese names. A glance at the newer works of reference