S. A. S. Bridgewater. _The Elder Tree._--I was visiting a poor parishioner the other day, when the following question was put to me. "Pray, Sir, can you tell me whether there is any doubt of what kind of wood our Lord's cross was made? I have always heard that it was made of _elder_, and we look carefully into the faggots before we burn them, for fear that there should be any of this wood in them." My Query is, Whether this is a common superstition? RUBI. * * * * * Minor Notes. _The Word "Party."_--Our facetious friend _Punch_ has recently made merry with the modern use of the word "party," as applied to any absent person concerned in any pending negotiation. It was used thus, however, by William Salmon, professor of physic, in his _Family Dictionary_, 1705: "Let the party, if it can be agreeable, rub frequently his teeth with the ashes that remain in a pipe after it is smoaked."--P. 315. "Having cooled it, rub the party's mouth with a little of it," &c.--P. 321. E. D. _Epitaphs._--Churchyard literature presents to us some curious specimens of metaphor; and it is interesting to observe how an old idea is sometimes unintentionally reproduced. The following lines may be seen on a gravestone in the churchyard at Kinver, Staffordshire: "Tired with wand'ring thro' a world of sin, Hither we came to _Nature's common Inn_, To rest our wearied bodys for a night, In hopes to rise that Christ may give us light." {178} The writer was probably not aware that Spenser says, in his _Faerie Queen_, iii. 3. 30.: "And if he then with victorie can lin, He shall his days with peace bring to his _earthly In_." And again, _Faerie Queen_, ii. 1. 59.: "Palmer, quoth he, death is an equall doome To good and bad, the _common In of rest_." A Leicestershire poet has recorded, in the churchyard of Melton Mowbray, a very different conception of our "_earthly Inn_." He says: "_This world's an Inn_, and I her guest: I've eat and drank and took my rest With her awhile, and now I pay Her lavish bill, and go my way." You may, perhaps, consider this hardly worthy of a place in your paper; but I act upon the principle which you inculcate in your motto. ERICA. _Campbell's "Pleasures of Hope."_--It has often occurred to me that in two lines of the most celebrated passage in this poem,-- "O'er Prague's proud arch the fires of ruin glow, Her blood-red waters murmuring far below," the author has confounded Prague, the capital of Bohemia, with Praga, the suburb of Warsaw. The bridge over the Moldau, at the former place, is a stone one of European celebrity; and to it Campbell must have referred when using terms not at all applicable to that over the Vistula, which is of much humbler form and material.