Page:Pantadeuszorlast00mick.djvu/371

344 [“The bigos was not of course prepared then and there on the spot. It is usually made in large quantities, put into barrels, and stored in cellars. The oftener it is heated the more savoury it is.”—M. A. Biggs.]

[See p. 333.]

Queen Dido had a bull's hide cut into strips, and thus enclosed within the circuit of the hide a considerable territory, where she afterwards built Carthage. The Seneschal did not read the description of this event in the Aeneid, but in all probability in the scholiasts' commentaries.

N.B.—Some places in the fourth book are by the hand of Stefan Witwicki.]

Once in the Diet the deputy Philip, from the village of Konopie (hemp), obtaining the floor, wandered so far from the subject that he raised a general laugh in the chamber. Hence arose the proverb: “He has bobbed up like Philip from the hemp.”

[There is here an untranslatable pun in the original; niemiec, the Polish word for German, is derived from niemy, dumb.]

[In the original: “And the Word became—” “These words of the Gospel of St. John are often used as an exclamation of astonishment.”—M. A. Biggs.]

[“Of all spoils the most important were the spolia opima, a term applied to those only which the commander-in-chief of a Roman army stripped in a field of battle from the leader of the foe.”—Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities. They were awarded but three or four times in the course of Roman history.]

[In the original there is here an internal jingle between klucznik (warden) and puszczyk (screech owl).]

[This festival furnished the subject and the title for Mickiewicz's greatest poem, next to Pan Tadeusz. The poet's own explanation of it is in part as follows: “This is the name of a festival still celebrated among the common folk in many districts of Lithuania, Prussia, and Courland. The festival goes back to pagan times, and was formerly called the feast of the goat (koziel), the director of which was the kozlarz, at once priest and poet. At the present time, since the enlightened clergy and landowners have been making efforts to root out a custom accompanied by superstitious practices and often by culpable excesses, the folk celebrate the forefathers secretly in chapels or in empty houses not far from the graveyard. There they ordinarily spread a feast of food, drink, and fruits of various sorts and invoke the spirits of the dead. The folk hold the opinion that by this food and drink and by their songs they bring relief to souls in Purgatory.”]

[See note 1]

[The original here has a delightful pun. Gerwazy misunderstands his lord's high-flown word wassalow (vassals) as wonsalow (mustachioed champions). A long mustache was the dearest