Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 10.djvu/555

 12 S. X. JUNE 10, 1922.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 457 respectively some 35 and 25 miles. The longer section generally takes some seven hours, but I have known it covered in five hours. I have not noticed any distress on the part of the horses, and even in England to cover 35 miles on a horse without a stop in from five to seven hours would not be considered bad going. I have brought a pack-mule over the longer distance in about seven hours. It is true in the Cordilleras I have known the mules to stop very often, but this I believe was at a height of 17,600ft., and on a very steep part of the track. On level parts I did not notice any distress. The men in the mines here play football, and in November last I organized sports and races, and no one seemed the worse for their exertions. This does not put us far on the road to the inquiry as to the greatest height at which mules can travel, but it is interesting and has some bearing on the question, so I send it. R. Me. ADAH ISAACS MENKEN'S ' INFELICIA ' (12 S. iv. 273, 313, 374, 477, 519; x. 32, 79, 97, 115, 133, 196). None of the accounts of this lady's strange, meteoric career that I have read makes mention of the first of the five husbands alluded to at 12 S. ix. 519, " a nobody who maltreated and abandoned her " ; but there can be no question | as to her actual marriage to the remaining | four, including the pugilist Heenan, which marriage is emphatically denied at the last reference. The house in Seventh Avenue, New York, where the Heenans lived, is still pointed out. Larousse gives a lengthy biography of Miss Menken, as she was styled after her marriage to Alex. I. Menken, the musician, when she changed her second name, Dolores Adios Fuertes to Adah. This differs materi- ally from what has already appeared in these pages. It is stated that while chasing buffaloes in Texas with the cowboys (which was where she acquired that proficiency as an ecuyere which subsequently stood her in good stead in the part of Mazeppa) she was ambushed by the Indians, and only escaped death by executing a pas de serpent which electrified her captors. She was then rescued by General Harvey, at whose camp she remained some months translating French and Spanish documents. Later, having secured an independence through her dramatic exhibitions, she launched at Cincinnati The Israelite, a paper in which she wrote, in opposition to The Churchman, an article advocating the claims of Baron Rothschild to sit in Parliament. The article was reproduced in the English Press, the Baron sending her an acknowledgment in which he styled her " the inspired Deborah of her race." Besides her personal charm of face, figure and manner, her mental attributes gained her the marked esteem of many distinguished names Charles Reade, Dickens, Swin- burne, the elder Dumas among others. As regards the literary value of her volume of poems, ' Infelicia,' however, Allibone quotes from The Athenaeum to this effect : Verses which, if they were really written by the person whose name they bear, show much uncultivated pathos in sentiment and senseful love of nature to have existed in the author's mind ; also a wilderness of rubbish and affected agonies of yearning after the unspeakable, which achieves the nonsensical. N. W. HILL. San Francisco. The printers' strike, as cause or excuse, has made my ' N. & Q.' some nine weeks late ; the issue of Feb. 25 is just here (May 20). This is my reason for reviving this subject now. MB. J. H. MOOBE is wrong a matter of concern to me at least. My account was so utterly different from the 1888 introduction he cites that he should have seen I did not use it ; in fact I never saw it, and did not " assume " anything. Edwin James, a New York sport, published under his own name a pamphlet of that year, not memorable or careful, but contain- ing some interesting new items, apparently on Adah Menken's authority, and which I used cautiously. MB. MOOBE says there is no Milneburg : this is a quibble. There was till a few years ago, vide atlases and directories ; it is now annexed to New Orleans, but no more a blunder than the familiar " Harlem " in New York. He says " Adelaide McCord " is " demonstrably false." It is given by Brown, very thorough and closely con- temporary (1872) ; it is ridiculous to suppose that this one detail of the many thousands in his book would affect his getting a pub- lisher. James gives it too, sixteen years later ; he was his own publisher, and obviously did not invent it. I cannot know, of course ; but on its face a rakishly picturesque name like Dolores Adios Fuertes is far more likely to be invented than a humdrum one like McCord, and I still think it probably a literary pseudonym or friends' sobriquet. Swinburne's use does not contradict this, and The Times' obituary may have copied the burial record. The New Orleans direc- tory is pointless : the name is different, and Portuguese Fuentes or Fuertes is likely