Note 353 — PART III.

We have seen, in a previous page (p. 137, supra), that the lepers met with by Maundrell, in Palestine, in 1697, carried a kind of “cop,” or, as he expresses it, they came “with small buckets in their hands to receive the alms of the charitable.” Evelyn, in his interesting Memoirs, alludes to a curious mode of sending alms to the leper that he saw practised one hundred years ago in Holland. In his Diary, under the date of 26th July 1641, he states, “I passed through Deft to the Hague, in which journey I observed divers leprous poor creatures dwelling in solitary huts on the brink of the water, and permitted to aske the charity of the passengers, which is conveyed to them in a floating box that they cast out.”—Bray’s edition of Evelyn’s Memoirs, etc., vol. i. p. 12.