Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 4.djvu/89

 us. iv. JULY 29, mi.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

that man, " Bring the bread that we may eat." And he answered, " That bread has been stolen." Jesus marvelled greatly, but he said in his heart, " No matter" [haithuru]. He said, " Let us go our ways." And they went on till they were tired ; and they found a place where there was much sand ; and he said, " Let us rest here." And they sat down, and Jesus gathered up the sand and made three heaps, and prayed to God, and that sand was changed into gold. And he said, " Friend, take one heap of the gold, and one shall be mine, and one shall be for him who stole the loaf." And the man said, " I here am the man who stole the loaf." And Jesus said to him, " Take it, and this of mine also."

And Jesus went on his way, and left the man with the gold. That man could not go away and leave the gold, and he was not able to carry it, sc he stayed there till there appeared three men, riding on horses, and they seized that man and killed him. It was on account of that gold that they killed him.

Those three men said to one of them [sic], " Take some money, and go to the town and buy some bread and bring it, that we may eat." He mounted his horse and rode to the town, and bought some loaves, and planned in his heart to buy some poison and put it into the loaves for his companions, that they might die and he get their [share of the] treasure and also their horses, so that he could load them with the gold. And those two men his companions also planned that, when he came back, they would take the loaves [from him] and then kill him, so that they alone should get [the gold] and he, their companion, should get nothing.

That man put poison into the loaves, and returned to his companions. When he arrived, they asked him, " Where are the loaves ? " He took them out and gave them to them. And they took their companion and killed him. Then one of those two said to his fellow, " Let us eat the bread and load [the horses with] the gold and go away." They ate the bread, and, when they had finished eating it, they died.

All four men died on account of that sand which Jesus changed into gold, that he might find out who had stolen the loaf.

And when Jesus returned from the place whither he had gone, he passed along the same road. And there were people accompanying him, and when they came to that sandy place, they saw three heaps of gold and four dead men. Then those men asked, " What is the meaning of this ? Here is gold and four dead men." And Jesus set forth to them the whole story, from the beginning to the end, and said, " This is sand and not gold, and if ye wish that I should make it return to sand, I will make it return." And they said, " Make it return." And he prayed to God, and it was restored to its original form, and the gold was sand [once more].

A. WERNER.

SHAKESPEARIANA.

" THE LADY OF THE STRACHY." In

' Twelfth Night,' II. v. 45, the First Folio has : " The Lady of the Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe."

Some time ago I formed an opinion that strachy is a correct form, and depends on the O.F. estrache, race, extraction, lineage. But there still remained the difficulty of the capital S, and the use of the definite article. (The final -y is like the -y in duch-y).

I now think that both of these are inten- tional, and reveal the sense. Strache in itself merely means " lineage," bat the double emphasis implied (as above) shows- that the sense is special, and that the reference is to " the (special) lineage," the lineage of the lord of the domain, the lordly race. The sense is then exact and com- plete, viz., the lady of the old domain, of;' the ruling family, actually married the man who was no better than a yeoman in the lord's household. His title of " yeoman of the wardrobe " shows that he had a subordinate place in his lord's household, and that was his chance ; the end was that he married the greatest lady in the land, or one oi' them.

No one had much chance of guessing the^ true sense till Godefroy put forth his ' Old French Dictionary ' ; it is there that we find more than a dozen examples of the O.F. estrace, estrache, estrasse, extrace, " extraction, race, origine, commence- ment." From the " Chronicles of the Dukes of Normandy, 4, Andresen," he cites " S'entremist de 1'histoire de Rou e de s'estrace," i.e., has to do with the history of Rollo and his lineage. From Gaufrey, 3434, he quotes " qui fu de male estrache,'" who wa;S of a bad family. 1 suppose the Latin type is extractia, a variant of extractio. In fact, Ducange gives the form extracha, and quotes from a Bestiary (not that by Philip de Thaun) the following :

Que dirons dou niticprace, D'un oisel de mauvais estrace ? I.e., what shall we say of the nycticorax,, a bird of evil race ?

I explain strachy to mean "ancestral domain," or "family mansion."

" WALTER W. SKEAT.

'2 HENRY IV.,' II. iv. 21: ULYSSES; AND UTIS.

" By the mass, here will be old Utis ; it A\ill. be an excellent stratagem."

In the ' Life and Letters of Samuel Butler,' by his grandson, the author of ' Erewhon ' (1896), I find Baron Merian corresponding with the great head master, and saying that Homer and Shakespeare are the only poets. The Baron was particular^ taken with Dr. Butler's ingenious explanation of " old' Utis/' which is given from a commonplace