ed from the
asphalt on its surface and banks.

AS`PHODEL, a lily plant appraised by the Greeks for its almost
perennial flowering, and with which they, in their imagination, covered
the Elysian fields, called hence the Asphodel Meadow.

ASPHYX`IA, suspended respiration in the physical life; a term
frequently employed by Carlyle to denote a much more recondite, but a no
less real, corresponding phenomenon in the spiritual life.

ASPINWALL, a town founded by an American of the name in 1800, at the
Atlantic extremity of the Panama railway; named Colon, since the Empress
Eugenie presented it with a statue of Columbus.

ASPROMON`TE, a mountain close by Reggio, overlooking the Strait of
Messina, near which Garibaldi was defeated and captured in 1862.

ASQUINI, COUNT, a rural economist who did much to promote silk
culture in Italy (1726-1818).

ASSAB BAY, a coaling-station belonging to Italy, on the W. coast of
the Red Sea.

ASSAM` (5,500), a province E. of Bengal, ceded to Britain after the
Burmese war in 1826; being an alluvial plain, with ranges of hills along
the Brahmapootra, 450 m. long and 50 broad; the low lands extremely
fertile and productive, and the hills covered with tea plantations,
yielding at one time, if not still, three-fourths of the tea raised in
India.

ASSAROTTI, an Italian philanthropist, born at Genoa; the first to
open a school for deaf-mutes in Italy, and devoted zealously his fortune
and time to the task (1753-1821).

AS`SAS, NICOLAS, captain of the French regiment of Auvergne, whose
celebrity depends on a single act of defiance: having entered a wood to
reconnoitre it the night before the battle of Kloster Kampen, was
suddenly surrounded by the enemy's (the English) soldiers, and defied
with bayonets at his breast to utter a cry of alarm; "Ho, Auvergne!" he
exclaimed, and fell dead on the instant, pierced with bayonets, to the
saving of his countrymen.

ASSASSINS, a fanatical Moslem sect organised in the 11th century, at
the time of the Crusades, under a chief called the Old Man of the
Mountain, whose stronghold was a rock fortress at Alamut, in Persia,
devoted to the assassination of all enemies of the Moslem faith, and so
called because they braced their nerves for their deeds of blood by
draughts of an intoxicating liquor distilled from hashish (the
hemp-plant). A Tartar force burst upon the horde in their stronghold in
1256, and put them wholesale to the sword.