served as interpreter.  This man had become so familiarized with the officers, that the colonel allowed him to sit at our table.  One day we remarked that the interpreter was absent, a circumstance which seldom occurred; but, as we were finishing our dessert, he entered the dining-room in high spirits, bringing under his arm a bundle, carefully tied, which, he said, contained a fine water melon for our dessert.  This fruit, in the middle of December, is considered a great delicacy, and we all expressed a wish that he should produce it, when he immediately untied the bundle, and, to our great Horror, we beheld the head of a Lesghi, whom he had killed in fight on the other side of the Alazann during a sporting expedition, roll on the table.  Disgusted at this action, which among these barbarous mountaineers would pass as an excellent joke, we all rose from table, and retired to another apartment, whilst the Eingalo sat down to dinner, and, at every mouthful he took, amused himself with turning the head, which he kept close to his plate, first one way and then another.—­Ibid.

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MISCELLANIES

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RELIGIOUS FORTUNE TELLING.

The Sortes Sanctorum, or Sortes Sacrae, of the Christians, has been illustrated in the Classical Journal.

These, the writer observes, were a species of divination practised in the earlier ages of Christianity, and consisted in casually opening the Holy Scriptures, and from the words which first presented themselves deducing the future lot of the inquirer.  They were evidently derived from the Sortes Homerica and Sortes Virgilanae of the Pagans, but accommodated to their own circumstances by the Christians.

Complete copies of the Old and New Testaments being rarely met with prior to the invention of printing, the Psalms, the Prophets, or the four Gospels, were the parts of holy writ principally made use of in these consultations, which were sometimes accompanied with various ceremonies, and conducted with great solemnity, especially on public occasions.  Thus the emperor Heraclius in the war against the Persians, being at a loss whether to advance or retreat, commanded a public fast for three days, at the end of which he applied to the four Gospels, and opened upon a text which he regarded as an oracular intimation to winter in Albania.  Gregory, of Tours, also relates that Meroveus, being desirous of obtaining the kingdom of Chilperic, his father consulted a female fortune-teller, who promised him the possession of royal estates; but to prevent deception and to try the truth of her prognostications, he caused the Psalter, the Book of Kings, and the four Gospels to be laid upon the shrine of St. Martin, and after fasting and solemn prayer, opened upon passages which not only destroyed his former hopes, but seemed to predict the unfortunate events which afterwards befel him.