A Drum made of Human Skin.
John Zisca, general of the insurgents who took up arms in 1419 against the Emperor Sigismund, to revenge the deaths of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, who had been cruelly burned at the stake for their religious tenets, defeated the emperor in several pitched battles. He gave orders that, after his death, they should make a drum out of his skin. The order was most religiously obeyed, and those very remains of the enthusiastic Zisca proved, for many years, fatal to the emperor, who, with difficulty, in the space of sixteen years, recovered Bohemia, assisted by the forces of Germany. The insurgents were 40,000 in number, and well disciplined.
Groaning Boards.
Groaning boards were the wonder in London in 1682. An elm plank was exhibited to the king, which, being touched by a hot iron, invariably produced a sound resembling deep groans. At the Bowman tavern, in Drury Lane, the mantelpiece gave forth like sounds, and was supposed to be part of the same elm tree. The dresser at the Queen's Arm Tavern, St. Martin le Grand, was found to possess the same quality. Strange times, when such things were deemed wonderful—so much so as to merit exhibition before the monarch.
Abyssinian Tradition.
A curious tradition exists among the Abyssinians concerning the origin of burial. They say that when Adam found the body of the murdered Abel he carried it about upon his shoulders for twenty days, not knowing how to dispose of it. The Almighty took pity on him and sent forth a crow with a dead young one on its back. The crow flew before Adam until it came to a tract of sandy ground, in which it dug a hole with its feet, and there buried its young one. When Adam saw this, he dug a grave in the sand and buried his dead boy in it.
Cutting Timber by the Moon.
Columella, Cato, Vitruvius and Pliny all had their notions of the advantage of cutting timber at certain ages of the moon—a piece of mummery which was long preserved in the royal ordonnances of France to the conservators of the forests, who were directed to fell oaks only "in the wane of the moon" and "when the wind was in the north."
An Artist Tradition.
There is a tradition that Poussin, the French painter, unable to depict the foam on a horse's mouth in a picture he was finishing, angrily threw his sponge at the canvas, and thus accidentally produced the desired effect. It is a pity to spoil such an effective story, but it was told of Apelles, the Greek painter, nearly two thousand years before Poussin was born.