Two military terms have curious origins. _Sentinel_ has been traced through Italian to the Latin _sentina_, the hold of a ship, and is thus equivalent to the Latin _sentinator_, the man who pumps bilge-water out of a ship. It is curious to mark how the name of a naval official of whom constant vigilance was required has been wholly transferred to a post requiring equal watchfulness in the sister service. The other term to which we would call attention is _hussar_, a Hungarian word signifying “twentieth.” In explanation of this derivation, it is related that when Matthias Corvinus ascended the Hungarian throne in 1458, the dread of imminent foreign invasion caused him to command an immediate levy of troops. The cavalry he raised by a decree ordering that one man should be enrolled out of “twenty” in every village, who should provide among themselves for his subsistence and pay. We may pass now to some words of the same nature of less honorable significance. _Assassin_ remains in our language as the dread memorial of the domination of an odious sect in Palestine which flourished in the thirteenth century, the Hashishin (drinkers of _hashish_, an intoxicating drink or decoction of the _Cannabis indica_, a kind of hemp). The “Old Man of the Mountain” roused his followers’ spirits by help of this drink, and sent them to stab his enemies, especially the leading Crusaders. The emissaries of this body waged for two hundred years a treacherous warfare alike against Jew, Christian, and orthodox Mohammedan. Among the distinguished men who fell victims to their murderous daggers were the Marquis of Monteferrat in 1192, Louis of Bavaria in 1213, and the Kahn of Tartary some forty years later. The _buccaneers_, who at a later date were hardly less dreaded, derived their name from the _boucan_ or gridiron on which the original settlers at Hayti were accustomed to broil or smoke for future consumption the flesh of the animals they had killed for their skins. The word is said to be Caribbean, and to mean “a place where meat is smoke-dried.” Some of the contemptuous terms in our language have been attributed to remarkable origins. In _scamp_, we have a deserter from the field of battle (Latin _ex_, and _campus_), a parallel word to _decamp_; and in _scoundrel_, “a loathsome fellow,” “one to scunner or be disgusted at.” The old word _scunner_, still used as a term of strong dislike in Lowland Scotch, meant also “to shrink through fear,” so that _scunner-el_ is equivalent to one who shrinks, a coward. _Poltroon_ is “one who lies in bed,” instead of bestirring himself.