In these strenuous, mercenary, calculating days we want more loving-cups. We want more old grandmothers to leave cups of love to their children and grandchildren. And why should these loving-cups be only bequeathed? Why should not many rich people give loving-cups in their lifetime, and live to see the enjoyment they would give, the happiness and kindly feeling they would engender? Just think what untold kindly feeling would be caused by occasionally passing round a loving-cup in a workhouse. Even a convict prison would be none the worse, I venture to say, for the presence on stated or star occasions of a lovingcup passing the round. All convicts are not bad. In the worst criminal are good traits. Loving-cups can only foster and encourage the good. It is a contradiction of terms to say a loving-cup can do evil. But then a loving-cup should be suitably endowed. It is no use leaving a loving-cup in your will unless you leave the wherewithal to fill it, and let the filling be generous and good, and in keeping with the beauty and intention of the vessel itself. To give and endow a loving-cup is comparatively a small matter. A few hundred pounds will furnish and for ever equip such a cup, and yet how few, if any, think of this simple and inexpensive way of affording an immense amount of innocent pleasure and happiness to a vast number of their fellows.

"Love rules the court, the camp, the grove,

And men below, and saints above;

For love is heaven, and heaven is love";

and the loving-cup is just an attempt, feeble no doubt, 1 Notes and Queries, 2nd S., 7, p. 279. The Latin inscription ran :

"10 Junii, 1742 Poculum Charitatis

Nepotibus suis singulis et neptibus
Ab Aviâ amantissima C. N. legatum est,
Hâc mente,

Ut quoties alii alios interviserent,
Ex eo propinarent sibi,

Et memores quò affectu eos ipsa dellexit
Eo se invicem prosequerentur."

CIVIC MACES OF ST. IVES 315

but a noble one, to give a practical expression or illustration of that sentiment so truthfully and feelingly expressed by Sir Walter Scott.

And if a motto be wanted for engraving on a loving-cup, perhaps these lines of Edwin Arnold, from his Light of Asia, will better meet that want than any other I know :

"Have good-will

To all that lives, letting unkindness die

And greed and wrath; so that your lives be made
Like soft airs passing by."

But besides the famous Peace Loving-Cup the borough of St. Ives possesses two other pieces of ancient and interesting civic plate.

The two silver maces-I weighed them and found them to be five and a half pounds together-are of silver, each beautifully chased and engraved with the coat of arms of the borough on top, and female figures in repoussé pierced work round the head. They have large dents upon them as though they had been forcibly used at some time as weapons. There were formerly but one policeman for the borough and two sergeants of mace who were constables. These latter made the tour of the town and visited the inns at closing-time, and were called out on special occasions to assist the policeman. Probably they always carried the maces with them, and used them on unruly citizens when occasion required. The Sir Francis Bassett who gave the massive silver loving-cup to St. Ives obtained for the borough its first charter in 1639, when it was made a municipality, with a mayor, recorder, and town clerk. accounts for 1639-40, which I looked up, I read : More given to Mr. Robert Arundle when he brought the cupp given by his Maister to our Towne £2 "--a considerable gratuity for those days, when we read: "To Andrew Lawrie for his wages being Towne Clarke 8s."!

In the
Item.

The arms were thus blazoned for St. Ives: Argent an ivy branch, whole field vert.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE POWER OF SEVEN AND THE MAN WITH SEVEN WIVES

ST:

"As I was going to St. Ives

I met a man with seven wives;
Each wife had seven sacks,

Each sack had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits,

Kits, cats, sacks, and wives,

How many were there going to St. Ives?”

NT. IVES holds a distinguished place in the recollec tions of the nursery. What calculating master and arithmetical miss has not toiled and laboured over the hopeless task of discovering the aggregate number of "kits, cats, sacks, and wives" journeying towards the ancient borough of St. Ia?

Children are early instructed in the history of this puzzling gentleman who met so many powers of seven on his way to St. Ives, and in the plaintive narrative, according to which the sisters and brothers of Wordsworth's little maid are positively affirmed and reaffirmed to have been “seven in all." When they get a little older they are told not to cry, lest they should frighten nurse out of her seven senses. If this awful threat be of no avail, they are solaced with the soothing account of the "Seven Wise Men," a description of the "Seven Wonders of the World," or the prodigy in the "Seven-league Boots"; and are warned to avoid having things about them "all sixes and sevens." But even to grown-up people seven is a number of much solemnity. The innocent gentleman from the country who once upon a time strayed into that charming locality

"Where to seven streets seven dials count the day,
And from each other catch the circling ray,"

had probably an opportunity of remembering the number seven through gloomy reminiscences of the loss of his own

WHAT'S IN A NUMBER?

317

"dial," with everything else handy which he might have had upon his person.

Pythagoras, however, who lived before the days of Seven Dials, pronounced the number to belong especially to sacred things; and we find Hippocrates, four and a half centuries before our era, dividing the ages of man into seven, an arrangement afterwards adopted by Shakspere. But long before this the Egyptian priests enjoined rest on the seventh day, because they said it was an unlucky day, a dies infaustus, though there is little doubt that this ancient institution of a sabbath was primarily derived from the Chaldeans. There were seven planets in Egyptian astronomy, and hence the seven days of the week, each ruled by and named after its proper constellation. The ancient Peruvians had a tradition of the Deluge, from which seven persons saved themselves in a cave and repeopled the earth; and the old inhabitants of Mexico similarly traced their descent from a like number of persons, each of whom was hidden in a separate cave during the inundation of water.

How this peculiar use of the number spread from the Old to the New World it is impossible to say, hopeless to conjecture. Maybe its marvellously frequent employment is a trait of character common to man. As the dog, no matter how domesticated, grunts and groans in his sleep in memory of the prairie-hunting days of his remote ancestors, so perhaps man has the number seven ingrained in his nature. At any rate, there are seven holes in a man's head-two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, and a mouth-and formerly he was supposed to possess seven pairs of nerves. Such points of likeness are common to the genus. It is noticeable, and certainly

singular, that the ancient people of Peru were found to be employing a seven-day week without planetary names for those divisions of time. The ancient Jews considered this number the embodiment of perfection and unity; thus they say the Hebrew letters composing Samuel have the value of seven, this name having been given to him because of the greatness and perfection of his character.

Undoubtedly seven is the sacred number. There are seven days of creation; after seven days' respite the flood came; the years of famine and plenty were in cycles of

seven; every seventh day was a sabbath; every seventh year the sabbath of rest; after every seven times seven years came the jubilee; the feasts of unleavened bread and of tabernacles were observed seven days; the golden candlestick had seven branches; seven priests with seven trumpets surrounded Jericho seven times and seven times on the seventh day; Jacob obtained his wives by servitude of seven years; Samson kept his nuptials seven days, and on the seventh day he put a riddle to his wife, and he was bound with seven green withes, and seven locks of his hair were shaved off; Nebuchadnezzar was seven years a beast; Shadrach and his two companions in misfortune were cast into a furnace heated seven times more than it was wont. In the New Testament nearly everything occurs by sevens, and at the end of the sacred volume we read of seven churches, seven candlesticks, seven spirits, seven trumpets, seven seals, seven stars, seven thunders, seven vials, seven plagues, seven angels, and a seven-headed monster. Such are merely a few instances of the sacred use of the number whose employment in this connection seems common to all nations and all religions. Not very long ago in England the seventh son of a seventh son was reputed to possess singular powers of healing. In Cornwall the breaking of a looking-glass entails seven years of trouble, but no want.

Delightful stories of slumberers carry on the same idea. The sleepers of Ephesus are seven; Barbarossa changes his position during his long sleep once every seven years; Olger Dansk stamps his iron mace on the floor once during the same period; Olger Redbeard's sleep is so sound in Sweden that his eyelids lift only once in seven years; Tannhäuser, while riding on his way to the Wartburg, sees Venus before him in all her loveliness, and getting off his horse, follows her to a cave in the mountain, where he spends seven years in enthralment. Similarly, in Scotland, Thomas of Ercildoune meets a beautiful lady of the elfin race beneath Eildon Tree, who leads him underground, where he remains with her for seven years; and in like manner Jonas Soideman, in the Faroe Islands, is entertained for the same length of time by spirits in a mountain. In Catalonia a young girl is spirited away into a mountain called Cavagun, where in unhallowed pleasures she passes seven years of