Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/158

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NOTES AND QUERIES. [9 th s. XIL AUG. 22, 1903.

on Yorkshire heraldry, and now I am puzzled The arras are Or, a bendlefc gu. betweei three birds sa. The first difficulty is that th description sometimes runs "three birds, ove all a bend let," and sometimes the bendle becomes a bend. But the great troubl is about the birds. What are they? Th authorities give them as birds, eagles eaglets, lapwings or peawits, ravens, anc sheldrakes, and it has been suggested b one writer that they are popinjays. Se Surtees Soc., vols. xxxvi. xli. xlv. (pp. 264-5) Harl. Soc., vol. xvi., and Foster's 'Visit Yorks,' 1584-5, 1612. W. 0. B.

JOHN WILKES BOOTH.

(9 th S. xii. 25.) QUITE possibly by this time some other correspondent has noted that the story of an Oklahoma man being really John Wilkes Booth, clipped from an American paper, was pure fiction, or, in the elegant modern phrase, a " fake " ; but it suggests a curious reflec- tion which I do not remember to have seen. The difficulty of convincing a certain order of minds that a man is really dead is one of the most confounding and inexplic- able problems in mental science. One would not suppose death to be so difficult of achievement, or its occurrence so improbable, that incredulity of the fact should defy not only the overwhelming weight of intrinsic probabilities, but the express testimony of competent eye-witnesses with no motive for falsification ; yet for a century at least (perhaps it has always been so) scarcely a criminal has perished by the hand of the law who has not been passionately believed by a large section of the community to have escaped by some legerdemain, either by collusion of the authorities or by their bein^ tricked, and lived out his life in peace under a disguise. At any rate, it is so in America I cannot answer for England. That William Morgan, the anti-Mason, should have been popularly accredited with romantic wander- ings in place of assassination is, perhaps though ridiculous enough, not inexplicable -there really was a mysterious disappear- ance; but why should people find it so hard to believe that any public victim, from Marshal Ney to the commonest murderer without a friend, ever really does get shot or hanged and die and stay dead ? Why do the same imbecile old theories of substitution of bodies, and hanging in a harness, and hang- ing or shooting a dummy, spring up around

every fresh victim with unimpaired vitality, when there is not a particle of evidence, or the faintest probability, that anybody having an atom of power to stay the hand of j ustice was interested in staying it? I have heard these stale old myths maintained with angry vehemence about more criminals than I have lived years, and several of them about executions in my own cities. It would almost be a novelty to have the reality of such a death undisputed. Guiteau, the murderer of President Garfield, was one case as if his custodians were not anxious to rid the world of his presence, or the u influence " was not all against instead of for him ; Wilkes Booth was another; another was a degenerate who outraged and murdered a little girl in a church belfry, whose confes- sion the sheriff would not publish because he said the public hated him badly enough already, and whose brothers changed their names to avoid being known as his relatives ; Dr. Webster, the murderer of Dr. Parkman uncle of the historian Francis Parkman), was another, the influential family being that of the victim and not of the murderer ; and I could swell the list to dozens, each believed by hundreds and thousands to have scaped a death inflicted in the presence of arge groups who knew the victim intimately, ind had neither power nor motive to spare him. There are always, also, people to vouch or the putative corpse having been seen alive ifterward ; and others who can describe -vith minute particularity how justice was waded, disclosed by some one to no one dentifiable. It can hardly be a survival of he same sort of instinctive feeling that kept nen from believing in the death of Merlin or King Arthur, for in these cases the wish is lot father to the thought, as nobody wants hem to live. I recommend this problem to tudents of psychology. F. M.

Hartford, Conn.

'RED UP" (9 th S. xi. 466). In Charlotte

-Brontes 'Jane Eyre,' fifth edition, 1855, hap. xxxvii. p. 452, is the following : " There, ir^you are redd up and made decent." It is am in familiar conversation by Jane Eyre tter she has combed the tangled hair of the

3hnd Rochester.

" To red one's feet. To free one's self from ntanglement ; used in a moral sense, 8. Of one 'ho has bewildered himself in an argument, or who

s much puzzled in cross-examination, it is often

aid He couldna red his feet.' Perhaps the

mmediate allusion is to one bemired.

-To red, v.a. To disentangle; as 'to red a

avelldhesp to unravel yarn that is disordered;

o redd, South English, having the same signification.

louglas. To red the head/ or hair, to comb out the