Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 6.djvu/161

. vi. AUG. is, i9oo.] NOTES AND QUERIES. 131 lucky enough to secure the services of C. .T Apperley, better known as "Nimrod," th first of whose famous letters ou huntini appeared in the number of January, 1822 Pittman kept a stud of hunters for his corre .-Ii.iinil-lit, defrayed the expenses of his tours and paid him a handsome salary in addition The next notable contributor was Surtees the immortal Jorrocks first appearing in numbers of the Sj>orting Magazine. Pittman dying in 1827, his magazine passed unde new management as the New Sporting Maga zine, and continued in high favour till the rise of the Field and other weeklies seems to have sapped its strength, and it dwindlec to a close somewhere in the " seventies." HERBERT MAXWELL. LOOKING-GLASS FOLK-LORE (9th S. vi. 7).—1 am surprised M. B. has never heard of the custom of covering up looking-glasses, or turning them face down wards, during thunder- storms. 1 have seen it very generally prac- tised by women for the past fifty years ; it is essentially a " feminine delusion." A looking- glass is supposed to attract the lightning, and the ongin of this belief is not difficult to discover: (1) Metals attract lightning, (2) most metals shine; (3) a looking-glass shines, and has shining quicksilver (a metal) on the back of the glass. C. L. D. Replying to the query of M. B., I may state that in my boyhood, fifty or more years ago, the habit mentioned was almost universally adopted by the maidservants at my native place, three miles from Tamworth, in South Staffordshire. The landlady of the house in Paddington where I now have rooms also informs me that she (a Londoner pure bred) has done the same ever since she was a girl, and that she inherited the habit from her mother, who was, however, a Kentish woman. EDWARD P. WOLFERSTAN. PICTURES COMPOSED OF HANDWRITING (9th S. v. 127, 255, 367). —Dr. John Francis Qemelli Careri's 'Travels through Europe' (in Churchill's 'Collection of Voyages and Travels,' 1752, vol. vi. p. 580) has this passage: "Among the greatest rarities [which he saw in the Armoury of Venice] is a crystal fountain, and 8t. Mark's head drawn with a pen, in which the strokes are not plain lines, but contain the whole gospel of our Saviour's {Mission, almost invisible to the eye, so that it cannot be read without a very convex magnifying glass." In Japan of old it was frequently con- sidered a work of piety for a penitent to draw himself, or by a hired artist, the figure of a Buddhist saint, to whom he was par- ticularly devoted, with the lines composed of all the letters in a chapter of a sacred book. In 1880 I saw one at Wakayama, which was the figure of Samanta Bhadra made up of the Chinese characters forming a section of the Saddharma Puudarika Sutra. KUMAGUSU MlNAKATA. 1, Crescent Place, South Kensington. "FACITO" (9th S. vi. 67).—In an edition of the ' Confessions' published at Cologne in 1637, after collation with three manuscript copies, by the Jesuit father H. Souiinalius, the passage quoted by DR. SFENCE reads : " Nam cogo & cogito, sic est, ut ago & actito, facio <fc factito"; and the same lection appears in Migne's ' Patrologia,' with agito instead of actito. 1^ cannot say with certainty that facito is ««ru£ Aeyd/iei'oi', but 1 have sought vainly for it in both classical and low Latin lexicons. It collides with the rule for the formation of frequeutatives only in being superfluous, as facere had already produced two frequentative forms, factare and factilare. Had facere lacked a supine, we should, of course, have fatitare in place of these. If facito is not a misprint in Bruder's edition. its occurrence in any textof the 'Confessions' may be attributed to a regard for uniformity in associating it with cogito and agito. Per- haps, too, the choice of actito has been simi- larly influenced by /actito. F. ADAMS. 115, Albany Road, Camberwell. ' THE WELSH PEOPLE ' (9th S. vi. 19).—As to the alleged non-Aryan population of Wales, s there any reason why this element cannot ae explained by the Silures, supposed Iberian, Hid so approximately Basque! Here we lave the evidence of Tacitus as to the Spanish tiiinitirs, and the fact that the Basque or Suskarian language is called non-Aryan. A. H. "TRANSLATOR" (9th S. vi. 46).—An hour or .wo after reading M.A.OxoN.'s note 1 found Autobiography of a Charwoman,' pp. 187-9. t also illustrates the use of snoo = cobbler which has ere now claimed our attention in N. & Q.':- " Children's boots and shoes ain't to be found ill he Cattle Market. You see they wears 'em quite ut afore they gives 'em up, children bein' 'ard on eather. But men's and women's can be picked up airish good by an enterprisin' translator, and wen one up new can be sold from one shilling to three- nd-six a pair. They calls this transmogrifyin', ranslatin'. It's like renoviatiiig a dress—puttin ew bits on the old; incitera. Translatin' is the rade name for this kind of work A snob is really patcher. Dobbs was too lazy to work tur an tstablishment, so 'ee took to snobbin', and feelin isself above it, 'ee called snobbers botchers, wich is
 * he following enlightening passage in 'The