cts. Nothing was too high or too
low: a bronze helmet from the plains of Marathon, which, to the classic
eye of an artist, conveyed the idea of a Minerva's head beneath it,
would not have been more prized by the Major than a cavalry cap with
some bullet-mark of which _he could tell an anecdote_. A certain skin
of a tiger he prized much, because the animal had dined on his dearest
friend in one of the jungles of Bengal; also a pistol which he vouched
for as being the one with which Hatfield fired at George the Third; the
hammer with which Crawley (of Hessian-boot memory) murdered his
landlady; the string which was on Viotti's violin when he played before
Queen Charlotte; the horn which was _supposed_ to be in the lantern of
Guy Fawkes; a small piece of the coat worn by the Prince of Orange on
his landing in England; and other such relics. But far above these, the
Major prized the skeleton of a horse's head, which occupied the
principal place in his museum. This he declared to be part of the
identical horse which bore Duke Schomberg when he crossed the Boyne, in
the celebrated battle so called; and with whimsical ingenuity, he had
contrived to string some wires upon the bony fabric, which yielded a
sort of hurdy-gurdy vibration to the strings when touched: and the
Major's most favourite feat was to play the tune of the Boyne Water on
the head of Duke Schomberg's horse. In short, his collection was composed
of trifles from north, south, east, and west: some leaf from the
prodigal verdure of India, or gorgeous shell from the Pacific, or paw
of bear, or tooth of walrus; but beyond all teeth, one pre-eminently
was valued--it was one of his own, which he had lost the use of by a
wound in the jaw, received in action; and no one ever entered his house
and escaped without hearing all about it, from the first shot fired in
the affair by the skirmishers, to the last charge of the victorious
cavalry. The tooth was always produced along with the story, together
with the declaration, that every dentist who ever saw it protested it
was the largest human tooth ever seen. Now some little sparring was not
unfrequent between old Mr. Dawson and Edward, on the subject of their
respective museums: the old gentleman "pooh-poohing" Edward's "rotten
rusty rubbish," as he called it, and Edward defending, as gently as he
could, his patriotic partiality for natural antiquities. This little
war never led to any evil results; for Edward not only loved