peitere and petietes peiteres of Polo’s account.  Rubruquis describes in Batu Khan’s tent a buffet near the entrance, where Kumiz was set forth, with great goblets of gold and silver, etc., and the like at the tent of the Great Kaan.  At a festival at the court of Oljaitu, we are told, “Before the throne stood golden buffets ... set out with full flagons and goblets.”  Even in the private huts of the Mongols there was a buffet of a humbler kind exhibiting a skin of Kumiz, with other kinds of drink, and cups standing ready; and in a later age at the banquets of Shah Abbas we find the great buffet in a slightly different form, and the golden flagon still set to every two persons, though it no longer contained the liquor, which was handed round. (Cathay, clxiv., cci.; Rubr. 224, 268, 305; Ilch. II. 183; Della Valle, I. 654 and 750-751.)

[Referring to the “large and very beautiful piece of workmanship,” Mr. Rockhill, Rubruck, 208-209, writes:  “Similar works of art and mechanical contrivances were often seen in Eastern courts.  The earliest I know of is the golden plane-tree and grape vine with bunches of grapes in precious stones, which was given to Darius by Pythius the Lydian, and which shaded the king’s couch. (Herodotus, IV. 24.) The most celebrated, however, and that which may have inspired Mangu with the desire to have something like it at his court, was the famous Throne of Solomon ([Greek:  Solomonteos Thronos]) of the Emperor of Constantinople, Theophilus (A.D. 829-842)....  Abulfeda states that in A.D. 917 the envoys of Constantine Porphyrogenitus to the Caliph el Moktader saw in the palace of Bagdad a tree with eighteen branches, some of gold, some of silver, and on them were gold and silver birds, and the leaves of the tree were of gold and silver.  By means of machinery, the leaves were made to rustle and the birds to sing.  Mirkhond speaks also of a tree of gold and precious stones in the city of Sultanieh, in the interior of which were conduits through which flowed drinks of different kinds.  Clavijo describes a somewhat similar tree at the court of Timur.”

Dr. Bretschneider (Peking, 28, 29) mentions a clepsydra with a lantern.  By means of machinery put in motion by water, at fixed times a little man comes forward exhibiting a tablet, which announces the hours.  He speaks also of a musical instrument which is connected, by means of a tube, with two peacocks sitting on a cross-bar, and when it plays, the mechanism causes the peacocks to dance.—­H.  C.]

Odoric describes the great jar of liquor in the middle of the palace hall, but in his time it was made of a great mass of jade (p. 130).