RIFLE-SHOOTING MATCH IN SOLEURE.

opportunity of witnessing it, when he may also observe the national manners and costume more closely than he will be able to do in a hasty tour through the country. It is held at each of the capitals of the cantons in turn the first week in July, commencing invariably on a Sunday. On Saturday evening, all the hotels are crowded for the opening procession next Sunday morning. From six A.M. on that day until nine, on the occasion when the writer was present, the broad flight of steps leading up to the cathedral at Soleure was crowded by worshippers. Mass was repeated again and again to each relay, and then, the religious duties of the day being over, all gave themselves up to pleasure. The streets were one mass of people waiting for the procession. The burning sun of a beautiful summer-day lightened up the scene, the cannon roared, bands of music added their sweet tones, and the variety of a hundred gay and fantastic costumes dazzled the eye of the amused spectator in the windows. Then came the cry: 'Here is the procession.' At its head walked the juniors, with two pieces of cannon and fifty guns; behind them a man in the costume of William Tell, the patron of riflemen, preceded the body of markers, who were dressed in bright-red blouses with white cordings, carrying at the end of a stick the white disks which serve to mark the shots. Then came the military band, followed by the committee carrying the federal banner, bearing the motto: 'LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY? The deputations of marksmen from each canton, in the greatest variety of picturesque costume, followed those of Soleure wearing gray felt-hats, adorned with green ribbons; the Hanseatic towns, Bremen and Lubeck, sent their quota, dressed in rich green and gold coats, with a high-crowned hat

adorned with a plume of feathers. Most of those present had a bouquet of flowers in the front of their hats, no doubt given by some fair friend. The shooting-ground was about half a mile from the city, a beautiful plain, surrounded by the Vosges Mountains. A splendid avenue of trees led up to the gay pavilion of glass (see illustration on the following page), where the prizes for the successful competitors were hung. They consisted of watches, rifles, cups, gold and silver dishes, coffers, and purses filled with gold

Napoleons, amounting in all to a hundred and fifty thousand francs. To the left was the stand for the shooters, a long covered shed opposite twenty-seven targets, furnished with long tables for the convenience of loading. At each successful shot a paper ticket was given to the marksman, which he stuck in the ribbon of his hat; at the end of the day they were presented and counted up, and he who could return into the city in the evening with a hatful received much applause. Not the least amusing part was to turn to the right, and walk

on the preceding page). The shooting, usually lasts from Sunday to Sunday, though sometimes, from the number of competitors, it is prolonged for a few days. The holders of prizes receive an enthusiastic ovation, each returning to his family and business with the reassuring sentiment that he belongs to one vast family, bearing this device: One for all, and all for one.'

OLD SCARLETT.

Died, July 2, 1591, Robert Scarlett, sexton of Peterborough Cathedral, at the age of 98, having buried two generations of his fellow-creatures. A portrait of him, hung up at the west end of that noble church, has perpetuated his fame, and caused him to be introduced in effigy in various works besides the present. And what a lively effigy

short, stout, hardy, and self-complacent, perfectly satisfied, and perhaps even proud of his profession, and content to be exhibited with all its insignia about him! Two queens had passed through his hands into that bed which gives a lasting rest to queens and to peasants alike. An officer of Death, who had so long defied his principal, could not but have made some impression on the minds of bishop, dean, prebends, and other magnates of the cathedral, and hence we may suppose the erection of this lively portraiture of the old man, which is believed to have been only once renewed since it was first put up. Dr Dibdin, who last copied it, tells us that old Scarlett's jacket and trunkhose are of a brownish red, his stockings blue, his shoes black, tied with blue ribbands, and the soles of his shoes red. The cap upon his head is red, and so also is the ground of the coat

armour.

OLD SCARLETT.

CHILDREN DETAINED FOR A FATHER'S DEBT.

'You see old Scarlett's picture stand on hie; But at your feet here doth his body lye.

His gravestone doth his age and death-time shew, His office by heis token [s] you may know. Second to none for strength and sturdy lymm, A scare-babe mighty voice, with visage grim; He had interd two queenes within this place And this townes householders in his life's space Twice over, but at length his own time came, What he for others did, for him the same Was done: no doubt his soule doth live for aye, In heaven, though here his body clad in clay.' The first of the queens interred by Scarlett was Catharine, the divorced wife of Henry VIII., who

shire. The second was Mary Queen of Scots, who was beheaded at Fotheringay in 1587, and first interred here, though subsequently transported to Westminster Abbey.

A droll circumstance, not very prominent in Scarlett's portrait, is his wearing a short whip under his girdle. Why should a sexton be invested with such an article? The writer has not the least doubt that old Robert required a whip to keep off the boys, while engaged in his professional operations. The curiosity of boys regarding graves and funerals is one of their most irrepressible passions. Every grave-digger who works in a churchyard open to the public, knows this well by troublesome experience. An old man, who about fifty years

ago pursued this melancholy trade at Falkirk, in Scotland, always made a paction with the boys before beginning-Noo, laddies, ye maun bide awa for a while, and no tramp back the mools into the grave, and I'll be sure to bring ye a' forrit, and let ye see the grave, when it's dune.'

CHILDREN DETAINED FOR A FATHER'S DEBT. On the 2d of July 1839, a singular trial came on before the Tribunal de Première Instance, at Paris, to determine whether the children of a debtor may be detained by the creditor as a pledge for the debt. with five children, and some

Mr and Mrs

disap

domestic servants, lived for a time at a large hotel at Paris; and as they could not or would not pay their account, they removed to a smaller establishment, the Hôtel Britannique, the owner of which consented to make himself responsible for the debt to the other house. After the family had remained with him for a considerable time, Mr peared, and never returned to the hotel, sending merely a letter of excuses. Then Mrs away, leaving the children and servants behind. The servants were discharged; but the hotel-keeper kindly supported the five children thus strangely left on his hands, until his bill had run up to the large sum of 20,000 francs (about £800).

went

A

demand was then made upon him (without revealing to him the present dwelling-place of the parents) to deliver up the children; he refused, unless the bill was paid; whereupon a suit was instituted against him. M. Charles Ledru, the advocate for the parents, passed the highest encomiums on the generous hotel-keeper, and said that he himself would use all his influence to induce the father to pay the debt so indisputably due; but added, that his own present duty was to contend against the detention of the children as a pledge for the debt. The president of the tribunal, M. Debelleyme, equally praised the hotel-keeper, but decided that the law of France would not permit the detention of the children. They were given up, irrespective of the payment of the debt, which was left to be enforced by other tribunals.

JULY 3.

St Phocas, martyr, 303. St Gunthiern, abbot in Brittany, 6th century. St Bertran, bishop of Mans, 623. St Guthagon, recluse at Oostkerk, 8th century.

Born.-Louis XI. of France, 1423, Bourges; Henry Grattan, Irish parliamentary orator, 1750, Dublin.

Died.-Mary de Medicis, consort of Louis XIII. of France, 1642, Cologne; Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, 1792, Brunswick.

HENRY GRATTAN.

Ireland has great honour in producing Henry Grattan, and she will never be politically beyond hope while she continues to venerate his memory. With every temptation to become the tool of the British ministry, he came forward as the unflinching advocate of the just rights and independence of his country; a Protestant, he never ceased to claim equal rights for an opposite class of believers. In the blotted page of Irish history, it is truly a bright spot where Grattan (1780) obtains in the native parliament the celebrated resolution as to its sole competency to make laws for Ireland. An irreproachable private life admirably supports the grandeur of his public career.

This

An anecdote of Grattan's boyhood shews the possession of that powerful will without which there can be no true greatness: When very young, Mr Grattan had been frightened by stories of ghosts and hobgoblins, which nurses are in the habit of relating to children, so much so, as to affect his nerves in the highest degree. He could not bear being left alone, or remaining long without any person, in the dark. feeling he determined to overcome, and he adopted a bold plan. In the dead of night he used to resort to a churchyard near his father's house, and there he used to sit upon the gravestones, whilst the perspiration poured down his face; but by these efforts he at length succeeded and overcame his nervous sensation. This certainly was a strong proof of courage in a child.'-Memoirs of Henry Grattan by his Son (1848), v. 212.

EXPIRATION OF THE CORNISH LANGUAGE.

The 3d of July is connected (in a very slight manner, it must be acknowledged) with an event of some importance-the utter death and extinction

EXPIRATION OF CORNISH LANGUAGE.

of one of the ancient provincial languages of England.

Many have been the conjectures as to the person and to the locality, where lived the last individual who could speak Cornish. Dr Borlase, who published his History in 1758, says that 'the language had altogether ceased, so as not to be spoken anywhere in conversation; while Dr Bryce of Redruth affirms that the language had its last struggles for life, at or about the wild prominences of the Land's End. This fact Lhwyd, in a letter, March 10, 1701, corroborates. Our doubts are, however, settled by the detailed account of Dorothy Pentreath, alias Jeffries, who, born in 1681, lived at Mouse-hole, near Penzance, and conversed most fluently in the Cornish tongue. Her father, a fisherman, sent this young Sibyl at the age of twelve with fish to Penzance. Cornish she sold them, no improbability, as not until over twenty could she speak a word of English. The name Pentreath signifies the end of the sand. The following lines, giving Cornish and English alternately, will serve to confirm the occupation of the Pentreaths:

TO NEIGHBOUR NICHOLAS PENTREATH.
Contreoak Nicholas Pentreath,
Neighbour Nicholas Pentreath,
Pa resso why doaz war an treath
When you come upon the sand,
Gen puseas, komero why wryth
With fish, take you care,
Tha geil compez, hedna yw fŷr
To do right, that is wise,
Ha cowz meaz Dega, dega,
And speak aloud Tythe, Tythe,
Enna ew el guz dega gûr.

There is all your true tythe.

In

The Hon. Daines Barrington, who travelled in Cornwall in 1768, had an interview with her, which is described in the Archeologia, vol. iii.: When we reached Mouse-hole, I desired to be introduced as a person who had laid a wager, that there was no one who could converse in Cornish. Upon which Dolly Pentreath spoke in an angry tone of voice for two or three minutes, in a language which sounded very much like Welsh. The hut in which she lived was in a very narrow lane, opposite to two rather better cottages, at the doors of which two other women stood, advanced in years, and who, I observed, were laughing at what Dolly Pentreath said to me. Upon this, I asked them whether she had not been abusing me; to which they answered: "Yes, very heartily, and because I supposed she could not speak Cornish." I then said they must be able to talk it; to which they answered, they could not speak it readily, but that they understood it, being only ten or twelve years younger than Dolly Pentreath.'

Six years after this visit, though bending with old age, and in her 87th year, Dolly Pentreath could walk six miles in bad weather, her intellect was unimpaired, and her memory so good that she recollected the gentleman who had such a curiosity to hear the Cornish language. The parish maintained her in her poverty, while her fortune-telling and gabbling Cornish also contributed to her maintenance. She was short of stature, and towards the end of her life somewhat deaf, but positive that she was the only person who could

speak or know anything about the ancient tongue of her country. She died January 1778, and was buried in Paul Churchyard, where her epitaph, supposed to have been written by Mr Thomson of Truro, ran thus:

'Coth Doll Pentreath eans ha dean,
Marow ha kledyz ed Paul pleu,
Na ed an Egloz, gan pobel bras,

Bes ed Egloz-hay coth Dolly es.'

Old Doll Pentreath, one hundred aged and two,
Deceased, and buried in Paul parish too,
Not in the church with folks great,
But in the churchyard, doth old Dolly lie.

Thus much for Dolly. We also learn that the language was not entirely lost by her death; for a fisherman of Mouse-hole, in 1797, informed Mr Barrington, that one William Bodenoer was the last person of that place who could speak in Cornish. This man, some years younger than Dolly, frequently conversed with her, but their conversation was scarcely understood by any one of that place. Impossible as it is precisely to upon t the very last conversationalist, all accounts agree in making Dorothy the latest fluent speaker. Though her successors may have understood the language, they were unable to maintain a dialogue in the manner in which she did. A letter from Bodenoer, dated July 3, 1776 (two years before Dorothy's death), will shew the condition of the language:

fix

EXTRAORDINARY CALCULATORS.

On the 3d of July 1839, some of the eminent members of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, including MM. Arago, Lacroix, Libri, and Sturm, met to examine a remarkable boy, whose powers of mental calculation were deemed quite inexplicable. The boy, named Vito Mangiamele, a Sicilian, was the son of a shepherd, and was about eleven Fears old. The examiners asked him several questions which they knew, under ordinary circumstances, to be tedious of solution-such as, the be root of 3,796,416, and the 10th root of 2-2,475,249; the first of these he answered in half a minute, the second in three minutes. One question was of the following complicated character: What number has the following proportions, that if its cube is added to 5 times its square, and then 42 times the number, and the number 40 be

EXTRAORDINARY CALCULATORS.

subtracted from the result, the remainder is equal to 0 or zero?' M. Arago repeated this question a second time, but while he was finishing the last word, the boy replied: "The number is 5!'

Such cases greatly puzzle ordinary mathematicians. Buxton, Colburn, and Bidder, have at different times exhibited this unaccountable power of accounting. Jedediah Buxton, although his grandfather was a clergyman and his father a schoolmaster, was so neglected in his education that he could not even write; his mental faculties were slow, with the one wonderful exception of his power of mental arithmetic. After hearing a sermon, he remembered and cared for nothing concerning it except the number of words, which he had counted during their delivery. If a period of time, or the size of an object, were mentioned in his hearing, he almost unconsciously began to count how many seconds, or how many hair'sbreadths there were in it. He walked from Chesterfield to London on purpose to have the gratification of seeing George II.; and while in the metropolis, he was taken much notice of by members of the Royal Society. On one occasion he went to see Garrick in Richard III.; but instead of attending to the performance in the usual way, he found occupation in counting the number of words uttered by each performer. After striding over a field in two or three directions, he would tell the number of square inches it contained. He could number all the pints of beer he had drunk at all the houses he had ever visited during half a century. He once set himself to reckon how much a farthing would amount to if doubled 140 times; the result came out in such a stupendous number of pounds sterling as required 39 places of figures to represent it. In 1750 this problem was put to him to find how many cubical eighths of an inch there are in a quadrangular mass measuring 23,145,789 yards long, 5,642,732 yards wide, and 54,965 yards thick; he answered this, as all the others, mentally. On one occasion he made himself what he called 'drunk with reckoning' the following: In 200,000 million cubic miles, how many grains of eight different kinds of corn and pulse, and how many hairs one inch long?' He ascertained by actual counting how many of each kind of grain, and how many hairs an inch long, would go to an inch cube, and then set himself about his enormous self-imposed task. He could suspend any of his problems for any length of time, and resume it at the point where he left off; and could converse on other subjects while thus employed. He could never give any account of the way in which he worked out his problems; nor did his singular but exceptional faculty bring him any other advantage than that of being invited to the houses of the gentry as a kind of show.

Zerah Colburn, who excited much interest in London in 1812, was a native of Vermont, in the United States. At six years old, he suddenly shewed extraordinary powers of mental calculation. By processes which seemed to be almost unconscious to himself, and were wholly so to others, he answered arithmetical questions of considerable difficulty. When eight years old, he was brought to London, where he astonished many learned auditors and spectators by giving correct solutions to such problems as the following: raise 8 up to