Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 4.djvu/263

 12 S. IV. SEPT., 1918.]

NOTES, AND QUERIES.

257

8 in. or 9 in. the indications are very noticeable. The action is due to the difference in pressure between the outside and inside air, the latter pressure remain- ing constant, while the outside pressure varies. Differences cf temperature vitiate the accuracy by affecting the volume of the contained air ; hence the necessity for keeping the instrument in an equable temperature.

I first met with the instrument about 1866 in a Northern seaport, and learnt that it came from Hamburg. Afterwards, about 1890, I bought one from a glass and china shop, in a Lancashire town, in the ordinary way of business. I have seen none since, but would not be surprised to learn that they were well known in St. Helens or other places of glass manufacture.

ARTHUR BOWES.

Newton-le -Willows, Lanes.

" STRAITSMAN " (12 S. iv. 186). It used to be common in the Navy to speak of a ship commissioned for the Mediterranean station as going " up the Straits." I should think it probable, therefore, that " Straits- man " meant a ship trading in the Medi- terranean. A. G. KEALY,

Chaplain R.N. (retired).

" Straitsman " was a sailing vessel that traded between Great Britain and the Straits Settlements ; the ports it visited were, for the most part Penang and Singa- pore. As a generic term it is now obsolete.

N. W. HILL.

STEVENSON'S ' THE WRONG Box ' (12 S. iv. 159, 224).!. Ab agenda. As MB. C. B. WHEELER surmises, this is a term in Scots law. A person is said to be ab agenda when incapacitated for business or transactions of any kind, through old age, mental weak- ness, or any other cause. See ' Latin Maxims and Phrases, collected from the Institutional Writers on the Law of Scot- land,' by John Trayner, LL.D., p. 6 (Edin- burgh, W. Green & Son, 1894). T. F. D.

ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX : BURIAL IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY (12 S. iv. 183). I have not seen the 8th edition of Dean Stanley's work on Westminster Abbey, but I have a copy of "the " reprint " of the same, dated 1911, and I find that in the note (p. 206) relating to the picture in the Dulwich Gallery, as there printed, the words " of the old man " to " Westminster Abbey " are placed in inverted commas,

indicating that they were not written by the Dean, as MR. ABRAHAMS suggests, but were quoted from some one else, not named. Probably the commas had been accidentally omitted from the earlier issue.

ALAN STEWART.

"YOURS TO A CINDER" (12 S. iv. 189 r 228). An Indian officer told me recently that he had a letter about twenty years ago with this termination, evidently im- plying the intense heat of the day on which the letter was written to him.

The Rising Sun murder, which took place about seven years ago, created much excitement at the time. A postcard .had been written to a girl saying, 'Meet me at [here a picture of a rising sun] " at a specified time, and signed "Yours to a cinder." This was the only clue to the murder, and an arrest was made on it, but the trial resulted in a dismissal of the suspect. I believe the Rising Sun is a public-house somewhere in or near Tottenham Court Road. G. S. S.

Has it not been surmised that "Yours to a cinder " is only a humorous rendering of usque ad cineres, once a common sub- scription and valediction ? This suggestion strengthens that made by ST. SWITHIN.

L. I. GUINEY.

Compare "Yours till hell freezes," of which I have seen frequent examples.

FRED. R. GALE, Lieut. A.O.D.

MEDICAL MEN ASSASSINATED (12 S, iv. 217). 1849. Dr. George Parkman, by Prof. Webster, at Harvard University, Boston, U.S.A.

1855. Robert Stirling, near Gibside Park, Durham. John Cain, alias Whiskey Jack,, was tried, and acquitted, for the crime.

1862. A surgeon (name not given) at Preston, near Weymouth, by a f maniac about to be removed to a lunatic asylum.

See Irving' s ' Annals of our Time, 1837- 1871,' passim. W. B. H.

BOYS BORN IN MAY (12 S. iv. 133, 172). When we were living in Ireland some years ago, our cook, the daughter of a small farmer in a remote mountain district, told me that anything born on Whit Sunday was certain to kill some one. Her father, she said, had a foal which was ,born on Whit Sunday (only two or three weeks before), " but it hasn't killed any one yet." It was evidently under suspicion. In the