1, 2. Hair-pins made of hard wood, and stained with henna. 3. Ditto, of silver and fil-et-grain work. (About one-half usual size.)
TREATMENT OF LEPERS IN ENGLAND.
According to the tenor of various old civil codes and local enactments, when a person became affected with leprosy, he was looked upon as legally and politically dead, and lost the privileges belonging to his right of citizenship. By the laws of England, lepers were classed with idiots, madmen, outlaws, &c., as incapable of being heirs. But it was not by the eye of the law alone that the affected was looked upon as defunct, for the church also took the same view, and performed the solemn ceremonials of the burial of the dead over him, on the day on which he was separated from his fellow creatures, and confined to a lazar house. The various forms and ceremonies which were gone through on this occasion are described by French authors; but it is highly probable that the same observances were common in our own country.
A priest, robed with surplice and stole, went with the cross to the house of the doomed leper. The minister of the church began the necessary ceremonies, by exhorting him to suffer, with a patient and penitent spirit, the incurable plague with which God had stricken him. He then sprinkled the unfortunate leper with holy water, and afterwards conducted him to the church, the usual burial services being sung during their march thither. In the church, the ordinary habiliments of the leper were removed; he was clothed in a funeral pall, and, while placed before the altar, between trestles, the libera was sung, and the mass for the dead celebrated over him. After this service he was again sprinkled with holy water, and led from the church to the house or hospital destined for his future abode. A pair of clappers, a barrel, a stick, cowl, and dress, &c., were given him. Before leaving the leper, the priest solemnly interdicted him from appearing in public without his leper's garb,—from entering inns, churches, mills, and bakehouses,—from touching children, or giving them ought he had touched,—from washing his hands, or any thing pertaining to him, in the common fountains and streams,—from touching, in the markets, the goods he wished to buy, with any thing except his stick,—from eating and drinking with any others than lepers,—and he specially forbade him from walking in narrow paths, or from answering those who spoke to him in roads and streets, unless in a whisper, that they might not be annoyed with his pestilent breath, and with the infectious odour that exhaled from his body,—and last of all, before taking his departure, and leaving the leper for ever to the seclusion of the lazar house, the official of the church terminated the ceremony of his separation from his living fellow-creatures, by throwing upon the body of the poor outcast a shovelful of earth, in imitation of the closure of the grave.
According to the then customary usage, Leper Hospitals were always provided with a cemetery for the reception of the bodies of those who had died of the malady.
LUMINOUS APPEARANCE OF THE RED SEA.
All who have frequented the Red Sea, have observed the luminous appearance or phosphorescence of its waters. "It was beautiful," says a picturesque writer, who sailed from Mocha to Cosseir, "to look down into this brightly transparent sea, and mark the coral, here in large masses of honeycomb-rock, there in light branches of a pale red hue, and the beds of green seaweed, and the golden sand, and the shells, and the fish sporting round the vessel, and making colours of a beauty to the eye which is not their own. Twice or thrice we ran on after dark for an hour or two; and though we were all familiar with the sparkling of the sea round the boat at night, never have I seen it in other waters so superlatively splendid. A rope dipped in it and drawn forth came up as a string of gems; but with a life, and light, and motion, the diamond does not know." Those sea-lights have been explained by a diversity of causes; but the singular brilliancy of the Red Sea seems owing to fish spawn and animalculæ, a conjecture which receives some corroboration from the circumstance that travellers who mention it visited the gulf during the spawning period—that is, between the latter end of December and the end of February. The coral-banks are less numerous in the southern parts. It deserves notice, that Dr. Shaw and Mr. Bruce have stated—what could only be true, so far as their own experience went—that they observed no species of weed or flag; and the latter proposes to translate Yam Zuph "the Sea of Coral"—a name as appropriate as that of Edom.
RECENT PRICES OF SLAVES.