The details of the story may be very safely conjectured to have been--a Bishop or high church dignitary is going on a journey or pilgrimage; his horse drops a shoe; on being taken to a smith's to have it replaced, the animal becomes restive, and cannot be shod even with the help of the stocks; whereupon the bishop facilitates the operation in the manner before described. One feels tempted to ask why he could not have replaced the shoe without the smith's intervention. What I want to know is, of whom is this story told? I regret that not having seen the carving in question, I can give no particulars of dress, &c., which might help to determine its age; nor could my informant, though he perfectly well remembered the subject represented. He told me that he had often mentioned it to people likely to know of the existence of such a legend, but could never gain any information respecting it. C. J. E. King's Col. Cambridge, May 9. 1851. _King of Nineveh burns himself in his Palace_.--In a review of Mr. Layard's work on Nineveh (_Quarterly_, vol. lxxxiv. p. 140.) I find the following statement: "The act of Sardanapalus in making his palace his own funeral pyre and burning himself upon it, is also attributed to the king who was overthrown by Cyaxares." May I ask where the authority for this statement is to be found? X. Z. _Butchers not Jurymen_.-- "As the law does think it fit No butchers shall on juries sit."--Butler's _Ghost_, cant. ii. The vulgar error expressed in these lines is not extinct, even at the present day. The only explanation I have seen of its origin is given in Barrington's _Observations on the more Ancient Statutes_, p. 474., on 3 Hen. VIII., where, after referring in the text to a statute by which surgeons were exempted from attendance on juries, he adds in a note: "It may perhaps be thought singular to suppose that this exemption from serving on juries is the foundation of the vulgar error, that a surgeon or butcher from the barbarity of their business may be challenged as jurors." Sir H. Spelman, in his _Answer to an Apology for Archbishop Abbott_, says,-- "In our law, those that were exercised in slaughter of beasts, were not received to be triers of the life of a man."--_Posth. Works_, p. 112.; _St. Trials_, vol. ii. p. 1171. So learned a man as Spelman must, I think, have had some ground for this statement, and could scarcely be repeating a vulgar error taking its rise from a statute then hardly more than a hundred years old. I hope some of your readers will be able to give a more satisfactory explanation than Barrington's. E. S. T. T.