the expenditure for which the economy was instituted, and the result was a return to the lawful exercise, with every advantage to the children themselves, to those who were set over them, and to those who had to pay the expenses.

I have now submitted the programme which we who consider national necessities as the bases of national education would put before the nation in support of the grand revolution we suggest. Should it be urged that what we propose is too essentially physical or muscular, we answer that all education is, in the strictest sense, physical and muscular. Speech is muscular, expression is muscular, writing is muscular, composition is muscular, as much as mental. It is as purely a muscular act to decline a Greek verb as to walk across a tight-rope, except that the muscular movement, hardly so refined, is more concealed. We meet two men, one of whom is seen to move with ease and grace, the other with dulness and weight. We say, how accomplished the one, how uncouth the other. We hear two men discourse, the one with elegance, precision, style, the other with hesitation, blundering, rudeness. We say, how accomplished the one, how uncouth the other. In all these cases muscular force has played its equal part with mental aptitude or inaptitude. We see a man who has not been educated to grace of manner, or speech, or thought, assuming the part of a man of grace, manner, and thought, and, by much study, sustaining the character for a short time, as on the stage. But we know that the man only acts; he is not trained to the muscular skill that can carry him through all parts of life with equal grace, though he may, by intense labour, attain the minor part, and be perfect in it.

We know that no one who late in life enters a vocation requiring certain qualities, like that of a physician, a surgeon, a preacher, a pleader, a commander, a pilot, an engineer, a player, can gain that full self-possession which comes, as it is said, naturally, to the man who has been from early life trained in the work. Here, again, the failure we affirm is muscular as much as mental. The concealed muscular mechanism is not in working order. The mind may issue its commands, but, if the muscles fail to obey, the mind, like a general whose redcoats are undrilled and impervious, may break itself to imbecility and produce no results beyond hopeless and helpless confusion and defeat.

So we contend for the physical education of all our young, on the lines I have laid down, as the stirring want in this stirring time. Our intention is to make this nation a nation of heroes as well as scholars; a nation that the sculptor can describe as well as the historian; a nation that can hold its own in the scale of vitality, and protect its own by the virtues of courage, physical prowess, and endurance, as ably as by statesmanship and knowledge, more ably than by expediency and craft. In all which efforts we accept and act on the motto which our leader has riveted on our standard

THE HANGMAN'S ROPE:

A STORY OF NORTH DEVON SUPERSTITION.

[A DOZEN years ago few districts in England could compare with the remoter parts of North Devon for the complete lack of all those elements of culture which are summed up in the word 'civilisation.' Before railways and Board schools invaded the country, the general condition of its inhabitants was that which readers of Mr. Lecky's History will remember as characterising rural England, as a whole, during the eighteenth century. Its squires were of the type immortalised in Fielding's Squire Western.' Its clergy were often of the kind represented by 'Parson Chowne' in Mr. Blackmore's Maid of Sker.' Its farmers were no whit superior to the labourers of Wilts and Hants, most of them being unable to read or write. As a result of this state of things, all classes were permeated with the grossest and most phantastic superstitions. No doubt matters have within the last decade much improved, still the bulk of the lower classes in North Devon remain abjectly superstitious. Witches, charms, ghosts, &c., still continue to be popular articles of faith among adults, however much improved education may be gradually undermining such superstitions among the young.

During an incumbency of some years in one of the most secluded parishes of the district, the writer collected, as interesting relics of a time now beginning to disappear, a few memorials of the quaint beliefs of North Devonians, and among the rest, the curious superstition on which the following narrative is based.]

Y readers must not attach to the rather sensational title of The

ten would attribute to it. The hangman is not the public functionary who in England executes the last stern mandate of the law, nor is his rope the instrument employed on such occasions. In the West of England the hangman is not necessarily the executioner but the executed, the hanged man, no matter whether by his own volition or by that of others. In the present instance the hangman is a suicide, and his rope the means by which he has effected his unhappy object. This ill-omened cord seems to have possessed a great reputation in different times and countries for rare occult and beneficent qualities. The use which it has subserved and which to some persons would seem to desecrate the harmless twisted hemp, and to invest it with painful and repulsive associations, has had the effect, in the opinion of others, of consecrating it for the benefit of mankind, and charging it with most invaluable attributes. Before the melancholy event it was a mere rope-a halter purchasable for a few pence in the nearest saddler's shop-after the event it becomes a priceless relic, an invaluable specific, capable of producing effects which no other rope

to understand such an association in certain cases where a rope had been employed to strangle some eminently wise or religious man—a Christian martyr, for instance. Then, with the exercise of a certain amount of imagination, one might suppose that the virtues of the hanged saint or philosopher might by some occult process have been transferred to the instrument of his execution. But in the employment now spoken of, the good qualities of the hangman's rope seem independent of any virtues on the part of those whom it has strangled. As I have observed, it is in the West generally the rope by which the suicide has put an end to his existence, and neither there nor anywhere else is the self-destroyer regarded as worthy of any higher feelings than those of commiseration and contempt. I have sometimes thought that the guiding principles which inspired veneration for such strange relics and belief in their curative properties were in the beginning something of this kind :—

1. Extreme rarity.

2. Weirdness; by which I mean that peculiar combination of the mysterious, fateful, and terrible which the word 'weird' has come to signify.

3. The principle of contrariety, which has operated just as largely in the genesis of superstitions as the opposite principle of similarity or analogy. According to this principle objects are held to be invested by certain events with properties diametrically opposed to those they have previously held. Thus objects pertaining to or associated with death are credited with life-giving powers, or symbols of ill luck are employed to produce good luck.

These principles are found to pertain to the hangman's rope as well as to other relics and charms of the same kind. They, moreover, afford a means of uniting, so far as the diversiform aspects of strange superstitions can be united, the different implications which the hangman's rope seems to have acquired in different countries. In rural districts of France, for instance, as well as in Parisian clubs, a piece of hangman's rope is a coveted charm of professional gamblers, who suppose it an infallible talisman for securing good luck; probably for the reason that a symbol of especial ill fortune is credited with opposite influences, though it may be proved that such a symbol has often a prospective significance not opposed but similar to its retrospective meaning. It is also affirmed that this use of the hangman's rope is not unknown in London clubs.

With the Devonshire employment of the hangman's rope I became acquainted soon after I had taken up my residence in my old parish. I first heard of it from some of my people in an enumeration of various charms, &c., which they habitually employed as specifics for various kinds of diseases. I was told that striking with a hangman's rope' and carrying it in a bag round the neck, was an infallible remedy for the Evil-i.e. for all kinds of scrofula. In those days there was no parochial hangman's rope in the parish. The

not, indeed, that this was any especial obstacle, for I have often known a superstitious pilgrimage undertaken, to procure some charm or conjuror's advice, of sixty and even seventy miles. Even the lesser distance became, however, unnecessary for the strumous members of my own flock. The suicide of an old farmer in the next parish supplied them with a hangman's rope of their own, which was duly kept at a particular farmhouse on the outskirts of my parish, the inmates of which were unquestioned authorities on every branch of the occult science of rural superstition. Whether it was the 'hangman's rope' that belonged to the village of C-, or part of the cord by which old Farmer Hill managed to procure a final quittance from his debts and other entanglements, I do not at this moment recollect; but I had not been long in the parish before accident revealed to me the nature and use of the charm as it was employed by my own people

I happened one day to call at the house of a cottager to inquire after a boy whom I had missed from school. The cottage was situated at the end of a meadow, and a grassy path led up to the door. When I got to the house the door was partly open, and I saw the cottager's wife engaged, as I thought, in painting a swelling on the neck of the very boy whom I called to ask about. The woman did not see me at first, nor heard my knock at the door, she was so busied with her occupation of moving up and down a somewhat large paint brush on the strumous swelling, though I could not see that the action produced any discolouration. When she saw me she appeared much startled. She immediately desisted from her task, and hid her brush, as I took it to be, behind her back. Her confusion was so great that I felt quite at a loss to account for it.

"Good morning, Mrs. Tidball,' I said. 'I am sorry I frightened you, but I came to ask about Jim-why he is not at school. Has he a bad neck? I thought I saw you painting it with something just now.'

'He've got a bad neck, but I wurn't a painting o' un,' the woman muttered somewhat sulkily.

'What were you doing then?' I asked.

But to this question I received no answer. I began to suspect some charming operation, and was determined, if possible, to unearth the secret. But it was only after many persuasive appeals that Mrs. Tidball at last admitted that she was engaged in 'striking' her boy's neck with the hangman's rope, and that the object I took to be a paintbrush was the very implement in question. Being already much interested in the quaint superstitions and folk-lore of the neighbou hood, I tried to get at some rationale for the belief in such a curious specific and for the strange affinity that connected it with scrofula. The first theory that suggested itself to my mind was that it was a special charm for diseases of the neck, for the reason that having been worn round the neck to secure the intervention of death-the most

with life-giving and healing powers. But I found I was mistaken. Mrs. Tidball, when I had with some difficulty soothed her alarm and gained her confidence, assured me that the hangman's rope was a specific for the evil,' no matter on what part of the body it might show itself. I then inquired what reasons she had for believing in its virtues, but could discover nothing stronger than that folk told her zo,' or 'he'd cured zo and zo,' enumerating several cases in which the evil had disappeared before the potent magic of the hangman's rope. Some of these supposed cures had fallen under my own notice as instances of scrofula which had given way, I thought, to improved diet and medicine. I had the less reason for crediting the hangman's rope with any share in some of these cures, inasmuch as the patients belonged to the families of respectable and well-to-do farmers. I ventured to hint to Mrs. Tidball that possibly medicine and other such agencies might have helped the hangman's rope to discharge its healing office. But I was told that these agencies were quite indifferent. It was the rope that had effected the cure, 'an' nort else,' as Mrs. Tidball emphatically asserted. Pursuing my investigations into the reason of her belief, I was further informed that she had been told how the Devil presented every suicide with the particular cord by which he was to put an end to himself, and showed him how to use it, and she supposed that the rope must derive its power from its intimate association with the Prince of Darkness. Why, however, the Devil, contrary to his usual character, should seek to do good to mankind, or why he should desire to accomplish such laudable ends in so indirect a manner-these were questions on which Mrs. Tidball's occult lore did not throw any light. I, however, induced her to show me the charm. She took it from her pocket, where she had hidden it, and I now saw that the hangman's rope' was a piece of thick cord-the size usually employed for hempen halters'-about three and a half to four inches long, each end being bound round with a piece of thread to prevent ravelling. I was further instructed in the method of its use, which I have already described, and I saw the bag-now suspended round Jim's neck-in which it was commonly carried. Mrs. Tidball also assured me that if the bag and rope were to fall to the ground, the charm would be irrevocably lost, but she could not even guess any sufficing reason for such a fatality. Taking my leave of Mrs. Tidball, whose belief in the hangman's rope I found it impossible to shake, I promised to send Jim some medicine, which I suggested might aid the healing process of the charm, and received in return the promise that as soon as the swelling in the neck had abated he should come to school.

·

After my first introduction to the hangman's rope I often came into contact with it, together with other relics and charms of a somewhat similar kind, while I pursued my pastoral visits in the parish. The attempt was always made to hide from the passun' the employment of these magical nostrums; but whenever there was a case of