06 November

clothed in robes of light

Editor's note: the following entries were written between October 1836 and July 1837; no specific date is written in the journal.

The Abyssinians, after dressing their hair, sleep with their heads in a forked stick, in order not to discompose it.

At the battle of Edge Hill, October 23, 1642, Captain John Smith, a soldier of note, Captain-Lieutenant to Lord James Stuart s horse, with only a groom, attacked a Parliament officer, three cuirassiers, and three arquebusiers, and rescued the royal standard, which they had taken and were guarding. Was this the Virginian Smith?

Stephen Gowans supposed that the bodies of Adam and Eve were clothed in robes of light, which vanished after their sin.

Lord Chancellor Clare, towards the close of his life, went to a village church, where he might not be known, to partake of the Sacrament.

A missionary to the heathen in a great city, to describe his labours in the manner of a foreign mission.

In the tenth century, mechanism of organs so clumsy, that one in Westminster Abbey, with four hundred pipes, required twenty-six bellows and seventy stout men. First organ ever known in Europe received by King Pepin, from the Emperor Constantine in 757. Water boiling was kept in a reservoir under the pipes; and, the keys being struck, the valves opened, and steam rushed through with noise. The secret of working them thus is now lost. Then came bellows organs, first used by Louis le Debonnaire.

After the siege of Antwerp, the children played marbles in the streets with grape and cannon shot.

A shell, in falling, buries itself in the earth, and, when it explodes, a large pit is made by the earth being blown about in all directions, large enough, sometimes, to hold three or four cart-loads of earth. The holes are circular.

A French artilleryman being buried in his military cloak on the ramparts, a shell exploded, and unburied him.

In the Netherlands, to form hedges, young trees are interwoven into a sort of lattice-work; and, in time, they grow together at the point of junction, so that the fence is all of one piece.

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