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To sneeze on Friday, give a gift.

Saturday, receive a gift.

Sunday, before you break your fast,

You'll see your true love before a week's past."

My informant cannot recollect the consequences of sneezing on Wednesday and Thursday.

If you sneeze on a Saturday night after the candle is lighted, you will next week see a stranger you never saw before.

A new moon seen over the right shoulder is lucky, over the left shoulder unlucky, and straight before prognosticates good luck to the end of the moon.

Hair and nails should always be cut during the waning of the moon.

Whatever you think of when you see a star shooting, you are sure to have.

When you first see the new moon in the new year, take your stocking off from one foot, and run to the next style; when you get there, between the great toe and the next, you will find a hair, which will be the colour of your lover's.

When you first see the new moon after mid-summer, go to a stile, turn your back to it, and say,—

To see a Lover in a Dream.

—Pluck yarrow from a young man's grave, saying as you do so—

Sleep with the yarrow under the pillow.

J. M. (4)

Some time ago I was in the neighbourhood of Camelford (a small town in Cornwall), and inquiring the name of a church I saw in the distance, was told that its name was Advent, though it was generally called Saint Teen. Now Teen in Cornish = to light. Can this name have been applied from any peculiar ceremonies observed here during Advent?

J. M. (4)

Minor Notes.

Curious Inscription.

—I obtained the following inscription from a person in the country, and you wish to make a "note" of it, it is perfectly at your service. The arrangement of the letters is curious.

R. H.

Glass in Windows formerly not a Fixture.

—In Brooke's Abridgement, tit. "Chatteles," it appears that in the 21st Hen. VII., A.D. 1505, it was held that though the frame-work of the windows belonged to the heir, the glass was the property of the executors, and might therefore be removed by them, "quar le meason est perfite sauns le glasse." In A.D. 1599 Lord Coke informs us it was in the Common Pleas "resolved per totam curiam, that glass annexed to windows by nails, or in any other manner, could not be removed; for without glass it is no perfect house."

J. O. M.

D'Israeli: Pope and Goldsmith.

—Mr. D'Israeli congratulates himself with much satisfaction, in his Essay on the Literary Character, both in his Preface, p. xxix., and in the text, p. 187. vol. i., in having written this immortal sentence:

"The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces."

—more particularly as it appears Lord Byron had "deeply underscored it." Perhaps he was unaware that Pope, in a letter to Swift, Feb. 16, 1733, had said:

"A few loose things sometimes fall from men of wit by which censorious fools judge as ill of them as they possibly can, for their own comfort."

And that Goldsmith says:

"The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves most foolish."—Citizen of the World.

JAMES CORNISH.

Queries.

ON A SONG IN SCOTT'S PIRATE—"FIRE ON THE MAINTOP."

In the 231st number of that excellent New York periodical, The Literary World, published on the 5th of July, there is an article on "Steamboats and Steamboating in the South West," in which I find the following passage:—

"I mentioned the refrain of the firemen. Now as a particular one is almost invariably sung by Negroes when they have anything to do with or about a fire; whether it be while working at a New Orleans fire-engine, or crowding wood into the furnaces of a steamboat; whether they desire to make an extra racket at leaving, or evince their joy at returning to a port, it may be worth recording; and here it is:

"The last line is given by all hands with great vim (sic) and volume; and as for the chorus itself, you will never meet or pass a boat, you will never behold the departure or arrival of one, and you will never witness a New Orleans fire, without hearing it."

The writer says nothing about the origin of this Negro melody, and therefore he is, I presume, unaware of it. But many of your readers will at once recognise the spirited lines, which when once they are read in Walter Scott's Pirate, have somehow a strange pertinacity in ringing in one's ears, and creep into a nook of the memory, from which they ever and anon insist on emerging to the lips. The passage occurs at the end of the fifth chapter of the third volume, where the pirates recapture their runaway captain:—

"They gained their boat in safety, and jumped into it, carrying along with them Cleveland, to whom circumstances seemed to offer no other refuge, and pushed off for their vessel, singing in chorus to their oars an old ditty, of which the natives of Kirkwall could only hear the first stanza:

So run the lines in the original edition, but in the revised one of the collected novels in forty-eight volumes, and in all the subsequent ones, the first two stand thus:

This alteration strikes one as anything but an improvement, and it has suggested a doubt, which I beg to apply to the numerous and well-informed body of your readers to solve. Are these lines