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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9* s. XL FEB. 14, wra.

inscription on the house No. 28, Clerkenwell Road is justified ; but the stone might have been more appropriately fixed at the junction of the two houses Nos. 28 and 30, and the inscription might read :

In these two houses,

formerly one house, known as Penny's House,

and then numbered Nos. 28-30, Wilderness Row,

William Makepeace Thackeray,

Novelist and Essayist,

boarded while a scholar in the neighbouring Charterhouse School.

1822-1825. Floreat Sternum Carthusiana Domus.

The houses Nos. 28-30, Clerkenwell Road belong to the Charterhouse, and it would be a graceful act on the part of the authorities of that body to provide a stone with a suit- able inscription to mark the place where the young Carthusian Thackeray spent a portion of his schooldays. JOHN HEBB.

ST. BOTOLPH, CITY OF LONDON (9 th S. x. 508 ; xi. 54).

"St. Botolph is commemorated by four churches in the City of London. He was the special saint of East Anglia. To him in particular every wayfarer going north from London Bridge commended him- self. He died in the highest reputation for sanctity at Botolphston, or Boston, during the time Erken- wald was Bishop of London, and we find among the most ancient dedications one church at the foot of the hill leading to old London Bridge, and another without the Bishopsgate, at the very first step upon the Ermyn Street. When Aldersgate was built to relieve the traffic through what until then was the only northern gate a third church of St. Botolph was built, so that the traveller should lose no blessing on his journey by patronizing the alternative route. When Aldgate was opened probably in the eleventh century a fourth St. Botolph's 'Church was erected on the new road into Essex." See Loftie's ' London,' 'Saxon London,' chap. iii.

J. A. J. HOUSDEN. Canonbury.

"FROM THE LONE SHIELING" (6 th S. xii. 310, 378 ; 9 th S. vii. 368, 512 ; ix. 484 ; x. 64 ; xi. 57). I do not think it has hitherto been pointed out that Dr. Norman Macleod intro- duces the corrupt version of these lines in an article, ' Highlanders at Home and Abroad,' which appears in Good Words (vol. i., I860), and in which he attributes the authorship to Christopher North : "Most truly has Wilson expressed it [love of home] in his emigrants' song, ' From the dim shieling,' &c." Can MR GRIGOR supply the words of "the Gaelic version known in the Highlands to this day " 1 A musical setting of the English words 'has recently been published by Mr. Eneas Mackay P. J. ANDERSON. '

/ PRACTICES IN ENGLAND

> th S. x. 468 ; xi. 55).-The practice of painting

round the outside of the doors and windows of cottages with blue-wash, which still pre- vails in Picardy and Flanders, is also found surviving in parts of Wales. The mention of that old-world place Kidwelly by MR. J. H. MATTHEWS reminds me that I there saw, a few years ago, two ancient cottages so painted. The blue colouring, in Catholic France, is accounted for as being acceptable to the Holy Virgin, whose colour it is ; but the survival of the custom in Protestant Wales is remarkable, inasmuch as many generations must have, at some trouble, per- sisted in handing down a practice the origin of which, if they knew it, would be obnoxious to their sentiments. Is there any explanation for the Welsh custom? A. D. M.

Hampstead.

The distinction should, I think, be more clearly defined between such practices as have merely been renewed since their discon- tinuance at the Reformation and those which have never been altogether abandoned. It was the custom of my grandfather to bow towards the altar before taking his seat at the Windsor Chapel Royal, where he attended; but this was long before the Oxford Revival was thought of. And it was a custom until very lately, writes a correspondent in the Ecclesiologist of November, 1845, for the people of Stringston, in Somersetshire, to do obeisance to the churchyard cross. See ' Church Folk-Lore,' by the Rev. J. E. Vaux, F.S.A. This valuable little work, although not addressed to scientific antiquaries, is replete with records of such customs as are concerned in your correspondent's inquiry, its sub- title being 'A Record of some Post- Reformation Usages in the English Church, now mostly Obsolete.'

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL.

In this village the Angelus bell is still rung at midday ; it has now, however, lost its original meaning, and is merely considered as the signal for dinner. The curfew, too, always peals out from the church tower at eight o'clock every evening. JOHN T. PAGE.

West Haddon, Northamptonshire.

It seems more probable that the peculiar bell-ringing described by MR. KING is a sur- vival of the midday Angelus than of the sacring bell. JOHN HOBSON MATTHEWS.

Town Hall, Cardiff.

In my boyhood the " sermon bell," as we called it, was always rung at the conclusion of morning service in the parish church. This was in Nottinghamshire. C. C. B.

In the Church of Scotland the book-boards of the pews, or a sufficient number of them