PEMBROKESHIRE.

  Once to Rome thy steps incline. 
  But visit twice St. David’s shrine.

  When Percelly weareth a hat,
  All Pembrokeshire shall weet of that.

SCOTLAND.—­STIRLINGSHIRE—­BANNOCKBURN, 1314.

“Maidens of England, sore may ye mourn,
For your lemans ye’ve lost at Bannockburn”

ROXBURGH.

“Some of his skill he taught to me,
And, warrior, I could say to thee,
The words that cleft Eildon Hills in three,
And bridled the Tweed with a curb of stone.”

          
                                                            Scott.

WESTERN ISLES.

Seven years before that awful day,
When time shall be no more,
A watery deluge will o’ersweep
Hibernia’s mossy shore. 
The green clad Isla too shall sink,
While with the great and good,
Columba’s happy isle shall rear
Her towers above the flood.

This prophecy is said to be the reason why so many kings of Scotland, Norway, and Ireland have selected Icombkill for the place of their interment.

DUMBARTON.

  So cold the waters are of Lomond Lake,
  What once were sticks, they hardened stones will make.

PERTH.

  “Fear not till Birnam Wood
  Do come to Dunsinane”

* * * * *

RETROSPECTIVE GLEANINGS

GREEK BALLOT.—­VOTING AMONG THE ANCIENT GREEKS.

The manner of giving their suffrages (says Potter) was by holding up their hands.  This was the common method of voting among the citizens in the civil government; but in some cases, particularly when they deprived magistrates of their offices for mal-administration, they gave their votes in private, lest the power and greatness of the persons accused should lay a restraint upon them, and cause them to act contrary to their judgments and inclinations.

The manner of voting privately was by casting pebbles into vessels or urns.  Before the use of pebbles, they voted with beans:  the beans were of two sorts, black and white.  In the Senate of Five Hundred, when all had done speaking, the business designed to be passed into a decree was drawn up in writing by any of the prytanes, or other senators, and repeated openly in the house; after which, leave being given by the epistata, or prytanes, the senators proceeded to vote, which they did privately, by casting beans in a vessel placed there for that purpose.  If the number of black beans was found to be the greatest, the proposal was rejected; if white, it was enacted into a decree, then agreed upon in the senate, and afterwards propounded to an assembly of the people, that it might receive from them a farther ratification, without which it could not be passed into a law, nor have any force or obligatory power, after the end of that year, which was the time that the senators, and almost all the other magistrates, laid down their commissions.