If the parties persisted, the last oath was administered.  The combatants were obliged to swear solemnly that they had neither about them nor their horses, stone, nor herb, nor charm, nor invocation; and that they would fight only with their bodily strength, their weapons, and their horses.  The crucifix and breviary were then presented to them to kiss, the parties retired into their tents, the heralds uttering their last admonition to exertion and courage, and the challengers rushed forth from their tents, which were immediately dragged from within the lists.  Then the marshal of the field having cried out, “Let them pass, let them pass,” the seconds retired.  The combatants instantly mounted their horses, and the contest commenced.—­Foreign Review.

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SUPERSTITION RELATING TO BEES.

On further inquiry, it has been found that the superstitious practice, formerly mentioned,[1] of informing the bees of a death that takes place in a family, is very well known, and still prevails among the lower orders in this country.  The disastrous consequence to be apprehended from noncompliance with this strange custom is not (as before stated) that the bees will desert the hive, but that they will dwindle and die.  The manner of communicating the intelligence to the little community, with due form and ceremony, is this:  to take the key of the house, and knock with it three times against the hive, telling the inmates, at the same time, that their master or mistress, &c., (as the case may be,) is dead!

    [1] See page 75.

Mr. Loudon says, when in Bedfordshire lately, “we were informed of an old man who sung a psalm last year in front of some hives which were not doing well, but which he said would thrive in consequence of that ceremony.  Our informant could not state whether this was a local or individual superstition.”—­Magazine of Natural History.

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NOTES OF A READER

LAW REFORMS.

We copy the following eloquent and impassioned paragraph from the last Edinburgh Review:—­

“Thanks unto our ancestors, there is now no Star-chamber before whom may be summoned either the scholar, whose learning offends the bishops, by disproving incidentally the divine nature of tithes, or the counsellor, who gives his client an opinion against some assumed prerogative.  There is no High Commission Court to throw into a gaol until his dying day, at the instigation of a Bancroft, the bencher who shall move for the discharge of an English subject from imprisonment contrary to law.  It is no longer the duty of a privy councillor to seize the suspected volumes of an antiquarian, or plunder the papers of an ex-chief justice, whilst lying on his death-bed. Government licensers of the press