The Chinese pretend to have men among them so prodigious as fifteen feet high. Melchior Nunnez, in his letters from India, speaks of porters who guarded the gates of Pekin, who were of that immense height; and in a letter dated in 1555, he avers that the emperor of that country entertained and fed five hundred of such men for archers of his guard. Hakewill, in his "Apologie," 1627, repeats this story. Purchas, in his "Pilgrimes," 1625, refers to a man in China who "was cloathed with a tyger's skin, the hayre outward, his arms, head and legges bare, with a rude pole in his hand; well-shaped, seeming ten palmes or spans long; his hayre hanging on his shoulders."
According to the "Asiatic Researches," a very curious mode of trying the titles of land is practised in Hindostan: Two holes are dug in the disputed spot, in each of which the lawyer for the plaintiff and the lawyer for the defendant put one of their legs, and remain there until one of them is tired or complains of being stung by the insects, in which case his client is defeated. In this country it is the _client_, and not the lawyer, who _puts his foot into it_.
Of all the curious charitable institutions in the world, the most curious, probably, is the Cat Asylum at Aleppo, which is attached to one of the mosques there, and was founded by a misanthropic old Turk, who, being possessed of large granaries, was much annoyed by rats and mice, to rid himself of which he employed a legion of cats, who so effectually rendered him service, that in return he left them a sum in the Turkish funds, with strict injunctions that all destitute and sickly cats should be provided for till such time as they took themselves off again. In 1845, when a famine was raging in all North Syria, when scores of poor people were dropping down in the streets and dying there, from sheer exhaustion and want, men might daily be encountered carrying away sack loads of cats to be well fed on the proceeds of the last will and testament of that vagabond old Turk.
A patent passed the great seal in the fifteenth year of James I. "to allow to Mary Middlemore, one of the maydes of honor to our dearest consort Queen Anne (of Denmark), and her deputies, power and authority to enter into the abbies of St. Albans, St. Edmunsbury, Glassenbury and Ramsay, and into all lands, houses and places, within a mile belonging to said abbies, there to dig and search after treasure supposed to be hidden in such places."