Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 12.djvu/314

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NOTES AND QUERIES.

s - XIL CT - 17 > 1903 -

equally impossible to mistake. He knew how much more quick than ourselves the lower animals are to detect a supernatural presence, and therefore looked round fearfully, and saw, moving horribly across the darkness the Chinese ghost ! I inquired how he knew that it was a ghost. He explained that it was destitute of those appendages which are never mentioned in San Francisco without a blush ; in a word, it had no legs, they were cut off at the knees, and the thighs, or, as he pronounced it, the "thights," of the ghost were perpetually jerking up and down, with the action of a cyclist. This struck me as the most original feature of the story. I believe the cycling ghost is a variety as yet unknown, even to the Psychical Research Society and Mr. Andrew Lang. I could see that my friend was in deadly earnest, and did not like to wound him by any apparent scepticism, otherwise I should have suggested that this must be the spirit of some " scorcher " doomed eternally to revisit the scene of his unhallowed exploits. Curiously enough, some girls who came out of a tea-house while the ghost was still on the spot failed to perceive it, although it was visible to both dog and man. I ascertained that this was not on account of any inability to see ghosts affect- ing the whole sex ; on the contrary, many Chinese females can see ghosts, and my friend's wife told me that she had seen one in China, the revenant of a deceased girl friend. I cannot forbear from adding one more weird bit of lore, peculiarly interesting to a Londoner. It will be a surprise to most people, I am sure, to hear that the Chinese Embassy, in Portland Place, is haunted by a Chinese ghost, yet such is the fact. My friend saw it upon the staircase late at night, or rather early in the morning, and recognized it as one Chow, an attache who died at the Embassy years ago, and whom he had personally known. JAS. PLATT, Jun.

THE "Snip" HOTEL AT GREENWICH. The passing of this historic tavern, which the recent appointment of a receiver and manager seems to predict, is another instance of the changed condition of things at Greenwich within such a short space of time as the last decade. So recently as 1894 the last of the celebrated ministerial whitebait dinners was held, under the presidency of Lord Rosebery ^- S1 C l at t ] me ,i the P ros Perity of the Thv, Jl M gradually been on the wane, i hough the present building has only been in existence some sixty years, a token found whilst excavating for the Blackwall Tunnel bore the inscription "Ship and Turtle Tavern

of Greenwich, 1640," and it is probable the house was in existence previous to that date. The fact that coaching to Greenwich is no longer so fashionable as it was in the days of ' Pendennis ' no doubt partly accounts for the decay of this fine old tavern. A number of the cartoons and sketches associated with the "Ship" still adorn its walls, and are proofs of the popularity it has en- joyed for the last two centuries. Perhaps some reader of ' N. & Q.' who remembers it in its palmy days will tell us something of its history, political and otherwise, when the Greenwich whitebait dinner was one of the events of the season, and the " Ship " Tavern was amongst the most famous of hostelries. FREDERICK T. HIBGAME.

[Not a few writers must have pleasant memories of the Saturday Revieiv dinners (now long things of the past), once held at the rival Greenwich house, the " Trafalgar," the glory of which has also departed. MR. HIBGAME brings the whitebait dinner down ten years later than MR. COLEMAX, ante, p. 272.]

4 SERJEANT BELL AND HIS RAREE SHOW/ It is stated in Capt. R. J. H. Douglas's very valuable catalogue of 'The Works of George Cruikshank, 3 No. 195, p. 52, that " Dickens is supposed to have been connected with the literary part of the [this] book." This attribution can never, I think, be more than a supposition, for there is absolutely no evidence to show that Dickens had any share whatever in the production of the little work. There is a letter from MR. WILLIAM TEGG in ' N. & Q.' (5 th S. iii. 366), transmitting a copy of a letter from Dickens to his father, Mr. Thomas Tegg, the publisher of the book, from which it appears that the author of ' Sketches by Boz ' was approached on the subject, and that he agreed to do the work for a payment of one hundred and fifty pounds, on condition that his pseudonym of " Boz " was nowhere to appear ; but we have the assurance of Mr. Tegg that the negotiations fell through, and that nothing came of them. In Walford's Antiquarian, xii. 33 (July, 1887), there is a paper by the late Richard Herne Shepherd on this subject, in which he expresses his opinion that the introductory portion was the handiwork of Dickens, as well as some occasional passages, and he goes on to re- mark :

"We take the intercalated descriptive chapters added probably as an afterthought to swell the oulk of the book) to be the work of an inferior tiack hand probably of that prince of bores, the late 4 Peter Parley ' ; as the only complete copy of the book we have seen is lettered on the back of the cloth cover ' Peter Parley's Works Picture of the World.' "

I may observe, par parenthese, that my own