Part 27
[3] “The following account of Akbar’s Pachisi-board is from an old Agra periodical:--The game is usually played by four persons, each of whom is supplied with four wooden or ivory cones, which are called ‘gots,’ and are of different colours for distinction. Victory consists in getting these four pieces safely through all the squares of each rectangle into the vacant place in the centre,--the difficulty being that the adversaries take up in the same way as pieces are taken at backgammon. Moving is regulated by throwing ‘cowries,’ whose apertures falling uppermost or not, affect the amount of the throw by certain fixed rules. But on this Titanic board of Akbar’s, wooden or ivory ‘gots’ would be lost altogether. Sixteen girls, therefore, dressed distinctively--say four in red, four in blue, four in white, four in yellow--were trotted up and down the squares, taken up by an adversary, and put back at the beginning again; and at last, after many difficulties, four of the same colour would find themselves gliding into their _dopattas_ together in the middle space, and the game was won.”--_Bholanauth Chunder._
[4] Oluf, called God-dreng, who reigned before King Ring, is by Adam of Bremen supposed to be the real Holger Dansk: he accompanied Charlemagne to the Holy Sepulchre, and helped to place Prester John on the throne of India.
[5] In 1538 the citizens of Lund received orders to pull down the stone churches in disuse since the Reformation, and forward the materials to Copenhagen to be employed for the building of the new castle; and again, in 1552, a second supply was sent. Even Laura Maria, the big bell purchased with the legacy of Bishop Absalom, was not spared; she got cracked on the journey, was melted down and recast into two little ones, which still hang in the clock-tower of Kronborg. Laura Maria was looked upon almost as a saint, and Valdemar Atterdag, who believed in nothing, when on his death-bed is said to have roared out in a paroxysm of pain, “Help me, Soro! help me, Esrom! help me, Laura Maria, you big bell of Lund!”
[6] The Maiden’s Tower.
[7] The Rev. Matthew Horgan, the parish priest of Blarney, informs us that “the curious traveller will seek in vain for the _real_ stone, unless he allows himself to be lowered from the northern angle of the lofty castle, when he will discover it about twenty feet from the top with this inscription:--
Cormac MacCarthy Fortis, Me Fieri Fecit. A. D., 1446.”
Transcriber’s Notes:
1. Obvious printers’, punctuation and spelling errors have been corrected silently.
2. Some hyphenated and non-hyphenated versions of the same words have been retained as in the original.
3. Italics are shown as _xxx_.