and yet the same identical hour to
be referred to; nor is it in the least difficult to imagine that some
monkish transcriber, ignorant perhaps of the meaning of "o'clock," might
fancy he was correcting, rather that corrupting, Chaucer's text, by
changing "foure" into "ten."

I have, I trust, now shown that all these circumstances related by Chaucer,
so far from being hopelessly incongruous, are, on the contrary,
harmoniously consistent;--that they all tend to prove that the day of the
journey to Canterbury could not have been later than the 18th of
April;--that the times of observation were certainly 10 A.M. and 4
P.M.;--that the "arke of his artificial day" is to be understood as the
horizontal or azimuthal arch;--and that the "halfe cours in the Ram"
alludes to the completion of the last twelve degrees of that sign, about
the end of the second week in April.

There yet remains to be examined the signification of those three very
obscure lines which immediately follow the description, already quoted, of
the afternoon observation:

"Therewith the Mones exaltacioun
In mena Libra, alway gan ascende
As we were entryng at a townes end."

It is the more unfortunate that we should not be certain what it was that
Chaucer really did write, inasmuch as he probably intended to present, in
these lines, some means of identifying the year, similar to those he had
previously given with respect to the day.

When Tyrwhitt, therefore, remarks, "In what year this happened Chaucer does
not inform us"--he was not astronomer enough to know that if Chaucer had
meant to leave, in these lines, a record of the moon's place on the day of
the journey, he could not have chosen a more certain method of informing us
in what year it occurred.

But as the present illustration has already extended far enough for the
limits of a single number of "NOTES AND QUERIES," I shall defer the {387}
investigation of this last and greatest difficulty to my next
communication.

A. E. B.

Leeds, April 29.

* * * * *

DUTCH FOLK-LORE.

1. A baby laughing in its dreams is conversing with the angels.

2. Rocking the cradle when the babe is not in it, is considered injurious
to the infant, and a prognostic of its speedy death.

3. A strange dog following you is a sign of good luck.

4. A stork settling on a house is a harbinger of happiness. To kill such a
bird would be sacrilege.

5. If you see a shooting star, t