87 Little leaves of gold lie at the bottom of bottles of Dantzic brandy. [The city, formerly under Polish rule, was annexed to Prussia at the time of the Second Partition, 1793.]
88 [“The bigos was not of course prepared then and there on the spot. It is usually made in large quantities, put into barrels, and stored in cellars. The oftener it is heated the more savoury it is.”—M. A. Biggs.]
89 [See p. [333].]
90 Queen Dido had a bull's hide cut into strips, and thus enclosed within the circuit of the hide a considerable territory, where she afterwards built Carthage. The Seneschal did not read the description of this event in the Aeneid, but in all probability in the scholiasts' commentaries.
N.B.—Some places in the fourth book are by the hand of Stefan Witwicki.]
91 Once in the Diet the deputy Philip, from the village of Konopie (hemp), obtaining the floor, wandered so far from the subject that he raised a general laugh in the chamber. Hence arose the proverb: “He has bobbed up like Philip from the hemp.”
92 [There is here an untranslatable pun in the original; niemiec, the Polish word for German, is derived from niemy, dumb.]
93 [In the original: “And the Word became——” “These words of the Gospel of St. John are often used as an exclamation of astonishment.”—M. A. Biggs.]
94 [“Of all spoils the most important were the spolia opima, a term applied to those only which the commander-in-chief of a Roman army stripped in a field of battle from the leader of the foe.”—Smith's Dictionary of Antiquities. They were awarded but three or four times in the course of Roman history.]
95 [In the original there is here an internal jingle between klucznik (warden) and puszczyk (screech owl).]