[1] A guide for travellers, furnished by the villages.
[2] Court of the magistrate attached to the palace.
[3] “The following account of Akbar’s Pachisi-board is from an old
Agra periodical:--The game is usually played by four persons, each of
whom is supplied with four wooden or ivory cones, which are called
‘gots,’ and are of different colours for distinction. Victory consists
in getting these four pieces safely through all the squares of each
rectangle into the vacant place in the centre,--the difficulty being
that the adversaries take up in the same way as pieces are taken
at backgammon. Moving is regulated by throwing ‘cowries,’ whose
apertures falling uppermost or not, affect the amount of the throw
by certain fixed rules. But on this Titanic board of Akbar’s, wooden
or ivory ‘gots’ would be lost altogether. Sixteen girls, therefore,
dressed distinctively--say four in red, four in blue, four in white,
four in yellow--were trotted up and down the squares, taken up by an
adversary, and put back at the beginning again; and at last, after many
difficulties, four of the same colour would find themselves gliding
into their _dopattas_ together in the middle space, and the game
was won.”--_Bholanauth Chunder._
[4] Oluf, called God-dreng, who reigned before King Ring, is by Adam of
Bremen supposed to be the real Holger Dansk: he accompanied Charlemagne
to the Holy Sepulchre, and helped to place Prester John on the throne
of India.
[5] In 1538 the citizens of Lund received orders to pull down the stone
churches in disuse since the Reformation, and forward the materials
to Copenhagen to be employed for the building of the new castle; and
again, in 1552, a second supply was sent. Even Laura Maria, the big
bell purchased with the legacy of Bishop Absalom, was not spared; she
got cracked on the journey, was melted down and recast into two little
ones, which still hang in the clock-tower of Kronborg. Laura Maria was
looked upon almost as a saint, and Valdemar Atterdag, who believed in
nothing, when on his death-bed is said to have roared out in a paroxysm
of pain, “Help me, Soro! help me, Esrom! help me, Laura Maria, you big
bell of Lund!”
[6] The Maiden’s Tower.
[7] The Rev. Matthew Horgan, the parish priest of Blarney, informs
us that “the curious traveller will seek in vain for the _real_
stone, unless he allows himself to be lowered from the northern angle
of the lofty castle, when he will discover it about twenty feet from
the top with this inscription:--
Cormac MacCarthy Fortis,
Me Fieri Fecit. A. D., 1446.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been
corrected silently.
2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have
been retained as in the original.