There is little doubt, I think that the inscription was meant to typify the misfortunes of Margaret; but the preceding solution is still, in a grammatical point of view, unsatisfactory. If fort could be transposed to fait, the reading would be simple enough; but in these cases we are bound to take the inscriptions as we find them, and the Rebus in stone was the especial delight of the sculptors of the fifteenth century.
D. C.
St. John's Wood, July 28. 1851.
Ackey Trade (Vol. iv., p. 40.).
—Ackey weights were, and I believe are, used on the Guinea Coast for weighing gold dust: 1 ackey=20-1/32 grains Troy. The Ackey Trade must be, I suppose, the African gold dust trade.
W. T.
Curious Omen at Marriage (Vol. iii., p. 406.)
—H. A. B. asks at the end of his Note, "Why a coruscation of joy, upon a wedding day, should forebode evil?" and "Whether any other instances are on record of its so doing?"
As these questions have remained unanswered for some weeks, I am tempted to suggest that your correspondent may have laid too much stress on the fact of the joy having been expressed at a wedding, and that the passage he quoted from Miss Benger's Memoirs of Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia, may be simply an allusion to the old belief (still more or less prevalent) of "high spirits being a presage of impending calamity or of death." (See Vol. ii., pp. 84. 150.)
The late Miss Landon, in one of her novels, furnishes an additional notice of this belief: