nteau,
the two Customs men sprang forward.

"That must be searched by us," one cried, and in a minute they had it.

With the swiftness of experienced hands they found and pressed the
spring of the pistol, the silver plate flew open, and out dropped a
fragment of thick, common glass, just as Captain North had described the
thing. It fell upon the deck. The Major sprang, picked it up, and
pocketed it.

"Her Majesty will not be disappointed, after all," said he, with a
courtly bow to us, "and the commission the Maharajah's honoured me with
shall be fulfilled."

* * * * *

The poor gentleman was taken ashore that afternoon, and his luggage
followed him. He was certified mad by the medical man at Cape Town, and
was to be retained there, as I understood, till the arrival of a steamer
for England. It was an odd, bewildering incident from top to bottom. No
doubt this particular delusion was occasioned by the poor fellow, whose
mind was then fast decaying, reading about the transmission of the
Koh-i-noor, and musing about it with a mad-man's proneness to dwell upon
little things.

[Illustration]

PECULIAR PLAYING CARDS.

By

George Clulow

II.

[Illustration: FIG. 16.]

[Illustration: FIG. 17.]

The "foolish business" of Heraldry has supplied the motive for numerous
packs of cards. Two only, however, can be here shown, though there are
instructive examples of the latter half of the seventeenth and beginning
of the eighteenth centuries from England, Scotland, France, Germany, and
Italy. The example given in Fig. 16 is English, of the date of 1690, and
the fifty-two cards of the pack give us the arms of the different
European States, and of the peers of England and Scotland. A pack
similar to this was engraved by Walter Scott, the Edinburgh goldsmith,
in 1691, and is confined to the Arms of England, Scotland, Ireland,
France, and the great Scottish families of that date, prepared under
the direction of the Lyon King of Arms, Sir Alexander Erskine. The
French heraldic example (Fig. 17) is from a pack of the time of Louis
XIV., with the arms of the French nobility and the nobles of other
European countries; the "suit" signs of the pack being "Fleur de Lis,"
"Lions," "Roses," and "Eagles."

[Illustration: FIG. 18.]

Caligraphy, even, has not been left without recognition, for we have a
pack, published in Nuremberg, in 1767, giving examples of written
characters and of fr