Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/181

 12 s. vm. FEB. 19, 1921.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 143 Almost at the end of IV. i. there is an allusion to fairy's treasure, which vanishes if its possessor reveals it : But not a word of it : 'tis fairies' treasure, Which, but revealed, brings on the blabber's ruin. This is found agajn in 'A Woman is a Weathercock,' I. i. : I see you labour with some serious thing, And think (like fairy's treasure) to reveal it, Will cause it vanish. These are, so far as I have noticed, the only explicit allusions to this belief in the Elizabethan drama, though Shakespeare glances at it in 'The Winter's Tale,' III. iii. " This is fairy gold, boy," says the Shepherd to the Clown, when he discovers the gold left by the sea-shore, " and 'twill prove so ; up with't, keep it close We are lucky, boy ; and to be so still requires nothing but secrecy." This brief examination of 'The Fatal Dowry ' will, 1 hope, satisfy the reader that it is possible to detect Field's hand in his anonymous work, or work cf his that has been -.assigned to others, from its con- nexions with his acknowledged writings. Before I attempt to do this, it will be well to add a few words as to Field's vocabu- lary as displayed in the three plays to which his name is attached. It is not very dis- tinctive. It is true that he has a few quite uncommon Latinisms, but they are of little use to us in this investigation, since scarcely any of them are used more than once. "Pish" and "hum " (or "humh," as the folio usually prints it) are characteristic interjections of his. Other noticeable words are "continent" or "continence" (four times in the three plays), "importune" (three times), "innocency" (four times) and "integrity" (four times). I draw attention to these words merely because they are characteristic words that one may expect to find in Field, and do not suggest that some, perhaps most, of them are not occasionally used by one or other of the other authors of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays. "Continent," "importune" and " innocency " are the more valuable. I may note also " transgress " (used once in ' Amends for Ladies ! ) because it is of comparatively infrequent occurrence in these plays, and therefore affords slight corroborative evi- dence of Field's authorship where there are other suggestions of his hand. Generally with regard to the weight to be attached to words such as these words that are charac- i teristic but not uncommon while one or two ' in a play are obviously of little or no value,, the presence of several much increases their importance, though in all cases they needs the support of other evidence. H. DUGDALE SYKES.. Enfield. (To be continued.) HAZEBROUCK. II. (See ante, p. 121.) HAZEBROUCK'S record during the war earned for the town the Croix de Guerre. The citation, dated Oct. 31, 1919, was in the following terms : " Ville soumise pendant quatre ans au bom- bardement par avions et pieces a longue portee. A tenu jusqu' au bout avec une froide tenacite- A deux reprises sous la menace de la pression de 1'ennemi a gard6 son calme, accueillant refugies- et blesses, leur prodiguant ses soins." At the outbreak of hostilities the town, was occupied for a fortnight by a regiment of French reservists, but on the invasion of the Department du Kbrd on Aug. 20, the troops retired, and Hazebrouck was left without defence. A few days later refugees from Belgium, both civil and military,, began to arrive, quickly followed by French civilians from the inyaded districts. In one day Aug. 25, 1914 no fewer than 2,000 Belgians entered the town, and during the months and years that followed Haze- brouck was ever ready to extend its hos- pitality to its neighbours from over the border. In recognition of these services the King of the Belgians has lately con- ferred the Order of Leopold upon the Mayor of Hazebrouck as representative of the town... "Flamands de France," said the Belgian Vice-consul in conferring the decoration,, "vous avez recu fraternellement les Fla- mands de Belgique, je vous remercie de tout cceur ! " For all these refugees, both French and Belgian, Hazebrouck set to work in August, 1914, to organize relief, and became eventually a kind of rail-head for charitable works connected with the war. For two months the tide of battle passed Haze- brouck by, but on Oct. 8, about 9 o'clock in the evening, when the town was occupied by a single troop of f rench cavalry, enemy scouts, creeping along the line of railway, reached the station and even penetrated to the square in front, from where they fired into the town killing three civilians and five soldiers. They then retired. The next day,..