There was a good deal of common-sense shown here in the answers, it being generally allowed that no hard and fast rule could be laid down. “Sleep till you have slept enough,” says one girl; “and enough is not the same with everybody.” The time will be found to vary, with grown-up people, from six to eight hours in the twenty-four, it very much depending on whether they are strong or weakly. One competitor quotes a medical authority to the effect that “the weakly very rarely require more than nine hours’ sleep at the utmost, and a longer indulgence will scarcely ever fail to injure them.”
32. What is the most famous signal ever made to the British Navy?
Hardly any competitors omitted to answer this question; almost every one right too. The ever-to-be-remembered signal was that made by Lord Nelson, before the battle of Trafalgar—“England expects every man to do his duty.” It was a signal, says Southey, in his Life of Nelson, received throughout the fleet with a shout of answering acclamation, “made sublime by the spirit which it breathed and the feeling which it expressed.” As everyone knows, it was the last signal of our great naval hero, for he received his mortal wound in the heat of the action.
It is worth mentioning that one girl, whom we guess to be a humorist, would have it that the most famous naval signal was that made to the British fleet at the conclusion of the greatest naval review ever seen—that held in commemoration of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, in 1897. The Commander-in-Chief signalled that, at the request of the Prince of Wales, he “ordered the mainbrace to be spliced,” which, says our competitor, refers to “an extra ration of grog!”
33. What useful discovery was made by lighting a fire on the sand and using pieces of natron (sub-carbonate of soda) to support the cooking-pot?
The story of the discovery of glass—whether an actual historical fact or only a legend we shall not too particularly inquire—proved to be well known to all our girls. To quote one of them: “The credit of inventing glass was always given by the ancients to the Phœnicians. It was a discovery made quite accidentally by some Phœnician merchants, who were homeward bound in a ship laden with natron or soda. A storm came on, which obliged them to land on a sandy tract under Mount Carmel. There they rested their cooking pots on blocks of natron, and when the cooking was over found glass produced, by the union under heat of the alkali and the sand of the shore.”
34. What are the “borrowed days,” and how do they come by their name?
Those who did not answer this question, and those who answered it wrongly, are now informed that the “Borrowed Days” referred to, are the last three days of March. According to a popular tradition they were borrowed by March from April, in order to accomplish the destruction of a parcel of unoffending young sheep, a purpose, however, in which March did not succeed. The story is told in a well-known Scottish rhyme:—
“March said to Aperill,
I see three sheep upon yon hill,