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visions swirling in the air before him—a red-robed figure behind a desk, one that wore a snow-white peruke and a black cap—the sea of pale, expectant faces, riveted to the dock—the gaunt, bare framework of the black gallows tree. . . . But last of all, before he fainted and they began to carry him bodily toward Newgate jail, he saw the face of a bereaved girl, flushed and glowing with hatred and with triumph.

One of the most famous of all the fabulous beasts of history was the unicorn, whose name was derived from two Latin words which meant "one horn." It even gained a place in the coat of arms of Great Britain, its rampant attitude opposite the lion giving rise to the old nursery ballad, beginning, "The Lion and the Unicorn were fighting for the crown."

One of the earliest accounts of the unicorn was that of Ctesias, a historian of the Fifth Century B. C., who declared that in India there were wild asses, very fleet, having in their forehead a horn one and a half cubits long and colored red, black and white; from this horn drinking-cups were made which neutralized poison.

The unicorn was generally represented as a horselike animal save for the horn, which grew forward from its forehead and was twisted in a sort of rope pattern. Some early writers said that the unicorn had been known to worst the elephant in combat. It was usually savage and quarrelsome, but at sight of a young girl became gentle, and would come and lay its head in her lap. This story was illustrated in several old tapestries.

When the unicorn stooped to drink from a pool, its horn dipping into the water purified it and made it sweet. Purehas tells how a party of travelers were poisoned by "the root of Mandioca, but by a peece of Vnicornes home they were preserued." Sir John Mandeville asserted that in Asia there were "manye white Olifantes," (elephants) "Unycornes and Lyouns and manye other hydous Bestes with outen nombre." The animal was listed in some English works on zoology as late as the middle of the Eighteenth Century; and in France, even up to 1789, instruments supposedly of unicorn's horn were used to test the royal food for poison.

Edward Webbe, an English traveler of the Sixteenth Century, claimed to have visited the mythical monarch, Prester John, whom he located in Ethiopia. "I have seen," says he, "in a place like a park near Prester John's court, three score and seventeene unicornes and elephants all at one time, and they were so tame that I have played with them as one would playe with young lambes."