Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 8.djvu/546

 448 NOTES AND QUERIES. a distinguished strategist of the third century A.D., was notorious for his habit of bending his head back extraordinarily; once his master, Tsau Tsau, in order to attest the truth of the rumour, called and made him go before and ordered him to look behind ; then he turned his face just opposite the front, without the slightest motion of his body. According to O. F. von Mollendorff, ' The Vertebrata of the Province of Chihli,' in the I Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, New Series, xi., Shanghai, 1877, the Chinese wolf is the same species with the European one (Canis lupUS.} KUMAGUSU MlNAKATA. Tanabe, Kii, Japan. ' WOMAN AND HER MASTER.' The death | at the age of 82 of Lady Bancroft may I recall to some people the tremendously j exciting " booth " . drama of * The Life | and Death of Ned Cantor ; or, The Mysteries of Bordercleuch And The Negro Slave's Revenge,' in which Marie j Wilton figured as a sailor boy-hero at the i Bath Theatre in 1855 with distinctly* marked promise. This was a clumsy piracy of some episodes in the once-famous story, ' Woman and Her Master,' which i made the fortune of George Stiff and his London Journal. This very long story of | love," mystery, and horror (which gave the periodical, it is said, thrice the number of | enthralled readers that the best of Charles ! Dickens's shilling serials enjoyed at that i period) has a particular East London interest because it was the composition of ; that very erratic genius J. P. Smith, who for long intermittently lodged nearly opposite i The Hayfield, then still a conspicuous coaching and posting inn in the Mile End J Road ; and both the son and his still more | " bohemian " father, who turned up occa- j sionally needing help, were well known to j all the sworn " Brethren " of " the Road to | Harwich " from Aldgate to the old east- coast port of departure to Germany and j Northern Europe, and known, too, as old comrades to most of the buskers from the ! Pavilion Theatre of Whitechapel to the Norwich circuit of strolling players. It is on that famous and familiar coaching road through East Anglia from the metropolis that the opening incident of ' Woman and Her Master ' is set ; and " Ned Cantor," who figures early and late in the twice ; expanded plot, is a worse scoundrel than Bill Sikes or any of the rogues who were " in fashion " among novelists. of the middle nineteenth century. By the by, no small part of the repute of The London Journal among the more educated middle class of England (for the periodical was as often found in parlours and boudoirs as in kitchens) was due to the native artistic development of crafts- manship in the wood engravings of J. F. Smith's stories from ' Stanfield Hall ' to ' Temptation.' This was the work of John Gilbert, another East Londoner in his youth, the son of a Captain of the Tower Hamlets Militia ; and both father and son were well acquainted with the coterie of the gossip corner in the hub of Mile End. It was a legend of the coffee-room of The Hay- field that there the " deal " was concerted by which J. F. Smith escaped from the bondage (occasioned by his eccentricities) of The London Journal to the more strenuous hack-work (but better paid) of the new enterprises in periodical literature set np by John Cassell. Me. HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF. A coincidence is found in two anecdotes narrated in legal ana. In ' The Law, What I have seen,' &c., by Cyrus Jay, 1868, p. 118, ffc is told how Sir John Sylvester, Recorder of London (d. 1882), on finding the clock at the Old Bailey had stopped, felt for hi3 watch, and exclaimed, " I have left it in the watch-pocket over my pillow." This was heard by a sharp thief, who hastened to the Recorder's house in Russell Square, and obtained the watch from a country- girl servant there : the result being that " every watch-stealer, after this occurrence, was punished twofold." In ' Leaves of a Life,' by Montagu Williams, Q.C., 1890, chap, xxi., the author cites " a rather good story, though I am not prepared to vouch for its truth," to the effect that Sir James Ingham, soon after his appointment as Chief Magistrate at Bow Street in 1875, having before him what turned out to be a mistaken charge of watch-stealing, took occasion to remark that he had that morning accidentally left his exceedingly valuable watch at home at his house at Kensington ; upon which a fictitious " man from Bow Street " forth- with hastened to the Chief Magistrate's house and obtained the watch from^ the latter's daughter. How far one of these two alleged occur-