hile that which bears the
lines on his mother's portrait is blistered with tears.

My telling these recollections sets me thinking of others of the
same kind which strike the imagination, especially when one is
still young. You remember the monument in Devizes market to the
woman struck dead with a lie in her mouth. I never saw that, but
it is in the books. Here is one I never heard mentioned;--if any
of the "Note and Query" tribe can tell the story, I hope they will.
Where is this monument? I was riding on an English stage-coach
when we passed a handsome marble column (as I remember it) of
considerable size and pretensions.--What is that?--I said.--That,
--answered the coachman,--is THE HANGMAN'S PILLAR. Then he told me
how a man went out one night, many years ago, to steal sheep. He
caught one, tied its legs together, passed the rope over his head,
and started for home. In climbing a fence, the rope slipped,
caught him by the neck, and strangled him. Next morning he was
found hanging dead on one side of the fence and the sheep on the
other; in memory whereof the lord of the manor caused this monument
to be erected as a warning to all who love mutton better than
virtue. I will send a copy of this record to him or her who shall
first set me right about this column and its locality.

And telling over these old stories reminds me that I have something
which may interest architects and perhaps some other persons. I
once ascended the spire of Strasburg Cathedral, which is the
highest, I think, in Europe. It is a shaft of stone filigree-work,
frightfully open, so that the guide puts his arms behind you to
keep you from falling. To climb it is a noonday nightmare, and to
think of having climbed it crisps all the fifty-six joints of one's
twenty digits. While I was on it, "pinnacled dim in the intense
inane," a strong wind was blowing, and I felt sure that the spire
was rocking. It swayed back and forward like a stalk of rye or a
cat-o'nine-tails (bulrush) with a bobolink on it. I mentioned it
to the guide, and he said that the spire did really swing back and
forward,--I think he said some feet.

Keep any line of knowledge ten years and some other line will
intersect it. Long afterwards I was hunting out a paper of
Dumeril's in an old journal,--the "Magazin Encyclopedique" for l'an
troisieme, (1795,) when I stumbled upon a brief article on the
vibrations of the spire of Strasburg Cathedral. A man can shake