1753.—"God preserve me from the Scheithan Alragim."—Hanway, iii. 90.]
1863.—"Not many years ago, an eccentric gentleman wrote from Sikkim to the Secretary of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, stating that, on the snows of the mountains there were found certain mysterious footsteps, more than 30 or 40 paces asunder, which the natives alleged to be Shaitan's. The writer at the same time offered, if Government would give him leave of absence for a certain period, etc., to go and trace the author of these mysterious vestiges, and thus this strange creature would be discovered without any expense to Government. The notion of catching Shaitan without any expense to Government was a sublime piece of Anglo-Indian tact, but the offer was not accepted."—Sir H. Yule, Notes to Friar Jordanus, 37.
SHALEE, SHALOO, SHELLA, SALLO, &c., s. We have a little doubt as to the identity of all these words; the two latter occur in old works as names of cotton stuffs; the first two (Shakespear and Fallon give sālū) are names in familiar use for a soft twilled cotton stuff, of a Turkey-red colour, somewhat resembling what we call, by what we had judged to be a modification of the word, shaloon. But we find that Skeat and other authorities ascribe the latter word to a corruption of Chalons, which gave its name to certain stuffs, apparently bed-coverlets of some sort. Thus in Chaucer:
"With shetes and with chalons faire yspredde."—The Reve's Tale.
On which Tyrwhitt quotes from the Monasticon, "... aut pannos pictos qui vocantur chalons loco lectisternii." See also in Liber Albus:
"La charge de chalouns et draps de Reynes...."—p. 225, also at p. 231.
c. 1343.—"I went then to Shāliyāt (near Calicut—see [CHALIA]) a very pretty town, where they make the stuffs (qu. shālī?) that bear its name."—Ibn Batuta, iv. 109.
[It is exceedingly difficult to disentangle the meanings and derivations of this series of words. In the first place we have saloo, Hind. sālū, the Turkey-red cloth above described; a word which is derived by Platts from Skt. śālū, 'a kind of astringent substance,' and is perhaps the same word as the Tel. sālū, 'cloth.' This was originally an Indian fabric, but has now been replaced in the bazars by an English cloth, the art of dyeing which was introduced by French refugees who came over after the Revolution (see 7 ser. N. & Q. viii. 485 seq.). See [PIECE-GOODS, SALOOPAUTS].
[c. 1590.—"Sálu, per piece, 3 R. to 2 M."—Āīn, i. 94.
[1610.—"Sallallo, blue and black."—Danvers, Letters, i. 72.