The loftiest point, Bardon Hill, is 912 ft. On its
western flank lies a coalfield, with Coalville and other mining towns,
and granite and hone-stones are worked.

CHAROLLES, a town of east-central France, capital of an arrondissement
in the department of Saone-et-Loire, situated at the confluence of the
Semence and the Arconce, 39 m. W.N.W. of Macon on the Paris-Lyon
railway. Pop. (1906) 3228. It has a sub-prefecture, tribunals of primary
instance and commerce, and a communal college. There are stone quarries
in the vicinity; the town manufactures pottery, and is the centre for
trade in the famous breed of Charolais cattle and in agricultural
products. The ruins of the castle of the counts of Charolais occupy the
summit of a hill in the immediate vicinity of the town. Charolles was
the capital of Charolais, an old division of France, which from the
early 14th century gave the title of count to its possessors. In 1327
the countship passed by marriage to the house of Armagnac, and in 1390
it was sold to Philip of Burgundy. After the death of Charles the Bold,
who in his youth had borne the title of count of Charolais, it was
seized by Louis XI. of France, but in 1493 it was ceded by Charles VIII.
to Maximilian of Austria, the representative of the Burgundian family.
Ultimately passing to the Spanish kings, it became for a considerable
period an object of dispute between France and Spain, until at length in
1684 it was assigned to the great Conde, a creditor of the king of
Spain. It was united to the French crown in 1771.

CHARON, in Greek mythology, the son of Erebus and Nyx (Night). It was
his duty to ferry over the Styx (or Acheron) those souls of the deceased
who had duly received the rites of burial, in payment for which service
he received an obol, which was placed in the mouth of the corpse. It was
only exceptionally that he carried living passengers (_Aeneid_, vi. 295
ff). As ferryman of the dead he is not mentioned in Homer or Hesiod, and
in this character is probably of Egyptian origin. He is represented as a
morose and grisly old man in a black sailor's cape. By the Etruscans he
was also supposed to be a kind of executioner of the powers of the
nether world, who, armed with an enormous hammer, was associated with
Mars in the slaughter of battle. Finally he came to be regarded as the
image of death and the world below. As such he survives in the Charos or
Charontas of the modern Greeks--a black bird w