special significance to plunge their hands into a bowl of perfume
and distribute it among those who took part in the ceremony. Of
the perfumes, musk (_quatrain_ 38) was one which they affected
most. Brought commonly from Turkistan, it was, with certain
quantities of sandalwood and ambra, made into a perfume. And "the
wounds of him who falls in battle and of the martyrs," said
Mahomet, "shall on the Day of Judgment be resplendent with
vermilion and odorous as musk." This was repeated by Ibnol
Faradhi, who in the Kaaba entreated God for martyrdom and, when
this prayer was heard, repented having asked. . . . This quatrain
goes on to allude to things which can improve by being struck.
There is in the third book of a work on cookery (so rare a thing,
they tell us, that no MS. of it exists in England or in any other
country that can be heard of) an observation by the eighteenth-
century editor to the effect that it is a vulgar error to suppose
that walnut-trees, like Russian wives, are all the better for a
beating; the long poles and stones which are used by boys and
others to get the fruit down, for the trees are very high, are
used rather out of kindness to themselves than with any regard to
the tree that bears it. This valued treatise, we may mention, is
ascribed to Cœlius Apicius; its science, learning, and
discipline were extremely condemned, and even abhorred by Seneca
and the Stoics. . . . Aloes-wood does not emit a perfume until it
is burned:

Lo! of hundreds who aspire
Eighties perish--nineties tire!
They who bear up, in spite of wrecks and wracks,
Were season'd by celestial hail of thwacks.