Among the Chinese no relics are more valuable than the boots which have been worn by an upright magistrate. In Davis's interesting description of the Empire of China we are informed that whenever a judge of unusual integrity resigns his situation, the people congregate to do him honor. If he leaves the city where he has resided, the crowd accompany him from his residence to the gates, where his boots are drawn off with great ceremony, to be preserved in the hall of justice. Their place is immediately supplied by a new pair, which, in turn, are drawn off to make room for others before he has worn them five minutes, it being considered sufficient to consecrate them that he should have merely drawn them on.
These beads were made from the single joints of the articulated stems of Encrinites. The central perforation permitted them to be strung. From the fancied resemblance of this perforation to a cross, they were formerly used as rosaries, and associated with the name of St. Cuthbert—
"On a rock by Lindisfarm St. Cuthbert sits and toils to frame The sea-born beads that bear his name."
_Eating Animals that have Died a Natural Death._
The gypsies in Europe are very peculiar in their eating, and are, perhaps, the only race who will eat animals that have died a natural death. "Dead pig" is their favorite delicacy; and one of the most typical and most amusing of the Rommany ballads which Borrow has collected, celebrates the trick formerly so common among them of poisoning a pig in order the next day to beg its carcass for food.
The ancients put dead bodies into honey to preserve them from putrefaction. The body of Agesipolis, King of Sparta, who died in Macedonia, was sent home in honey. The faithless Cleomenes caused the head of Archonides to be put in honey, and had it always placed near him when he was deliberating upon any affair of great importance, in order to fulfil the oath he had made to undertake nothing without consulting the head. The body of the Emperor Justin II. was embalmed in honey. The wish of Democritus to be buried in honey is a confirmation of the practice.
We are told by Plutarch that a Spartan lady paid a visit to Berenice, the wife of Dejotarus, and that the one smelled so much of sweet ointment and the other of butter that neither of them could endure the other. Was it customary, therefore, at that period, for the ladies to perfume themselves with butter?