Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 5.djvu/181

 9< S.V. MARCH 3, 1900.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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=inad or wild. Applied to a recent Bene- dick, the phrase acquires additional point as hinting at the amorous spooney's " spooning, ' or sheepish ogling and windy sighing as he sits tied to his Dulcinea's apron-strings. The actual wooden spoon will be useful to the nincompoop in his married state, to eat his daily flapdoodle* with. Of course all this amicable banter of young men and close friends is given and taken in perfect good humour. The funny foreigner who, the other day, thought he was scoring a capital joke by sending a solitary thirty copecks to one of the papers here " towards furnishing mar- malade for the British now prisoners at the seat of war," would have done well to keep the money and buy himself a wooden spoon for his meals. H. E. M.

St. Petersburg.

BOX-IRONS (9 th S. v. 104). The enclosed extract may be ad rem :

" Once, when checking my boasting too frequently of myself in company, he said to me, ' Boswell, you often vaunt so much as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire, and thus accosted the person next him, "Do you, know, sir, who I am? 1 ' " No, sir," said the other, " I have not that advantage." " Sir," said he, "I am the great Twalm- ley, who invented the New Floodgate Iron.'" The Bishop of Killaloe, on my repeating the story to him, defended Twalmley by observing that he was entitled to the epithet of great ; for Virgil, in his group of worthies in the Elysian fields

Hie manus, ob patriam pugnando vulnera passi (<En.,'vi. 660, &c.)- mentions

Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artes." (Bos well's 'Life of Johnson,' chap, li., under date of April, 1783.)

And to this passage the biographer appends a note :

" What the great Twalmley was so proud of having invented, was neither more nor less than a kind of box-iron for smoothing linen."

GNOMON.

Temple.

"MARQUEE" (9 th S. iv. 499; v. 76). In Zola's ' La Bete Humaine 'that fearful night- mare of lust and blood, relieved by many a vivid and masterly description of scenes and events of railway life the word marquise repeatedly occurs to denote the sheds with glass and metal awning built over portions of the lines at stations to protect the rolling stock, e.g., in chap. i. p. 1 : "A gauche, les marquises des halles couvertes ouvraient leurs porches geants, aux vitrages enfurnes," &c. The word here has evidently undergone

tells. Printer's devil.
 * The stuff they feed fools on, as an old novel

a vsimilar extension of meaning to that sus- tained by " pavilion." In the passage quoted from 'Pere Goriot' is not the marquise the awning (of whatever material composed) over the steps leading from the street or drive into the halU En passant, I notice in Zola's book a technical use of "omnibus" to signify a mixed train (first, second, and third classes), as distinguished from "special," "fast," "express," "luggage," &c. I had a jovial friend here, a French actor, M. Buislay, who nearly killed us with laughing in his chameleon role of the " actor omnibus."

H. E. M. St. Petersburg.

"La voiture s'arretant sous la marquise du perron." In this sense Larousse thus explains marquise :

" Sorte d'auvent place au-dessus et en avant d'une porte, d'un quai d'embarquement de chemin de fer, afin d'abriter de la pluie les personnes qui montent en voiture ou qui en descendent."

Whence it evidently corresponds to the "awnings" which are used at our balls, weddings, &c, and are temporarily erected to protect those alighting from their carriages from inclemencies of weather.

J. HOLDEN MACMlCHAEL. Wimbledon.

A POKER VIRTUE (9 th S. v. 108). I have seen the poker placed in the position men- tioned in Derbyshire cottages with the object of making a dull or lazy fire burn, and though I have witnessed the result as desired, I do not attribute this to the virtue of the kitchen poker, or any other virtue except that of the fire, which, growing stronger, "burnt up," as the folks said. It is forty years since I saw the poker placed in this way, but I do not suppose that the practice, or the belief in it, is dead.

THOS. KATCLIFFE.

Worksop.

It is scarcely a question of the poker, but one of iron. See El worthy, ' Evil Eye,' 1895, and Hartland, 'Legend of Perseus,' 1894-6, 3 vols. The editorial note is, I believe, as correct as our knowledge will allow.

S. L. P.

Ulverston.

There seems to me to be a fatal objection to the sign-of-the-cross theory, namely, that grates with horizontal bars are, comparatively speaking, a modern invention. I should think that the poker has a real virtue only so long as it keeps the coals off the bottom of the grate, arid so lets in plenty of air to feed com- bustion. This, having often been found to