Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 291, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 December 1913 — Magic and Poison Rings. [ARTICLE]

Magic and Poison Rings.

The ring began when man thrust his finger through a hole in a pretty shell, and later learned to make rings of jet The ring is very magical. Lord Ruthven, who helped to kill Ricclo, gave Queen Mary a ring which was sovran against poison, and she generously replied with the present of her father’s wonderful jewelled dagger, of French work, no longer in existence. Whether Ruthven tooled with this magnificent weapon in the affair of Ricclo or used a cheaper article is uncertain. At all events, Mary based on the ring that was an antidote to poison a charge of sorcery against Ruthven. The Judges of Jeanne d’Arc regarded with much suspicion her little ring of base metal, a gift from her parents, inscribed with the sacred names Jesus Maria. It was usual to touch the relics of saints with rings; Jeanne d’Arc said that her ring had touched the body of St. Catherine, whether she meant of the actual saint or a relic of the saint, brought from Sinai to Flerbois. The ring might contain a relic, or, later, a miniature. I fear that I do not believe in the virtues or vices of poison rings. Our ancestors practically knew no poison but arsenic, and Carthaginian science can scarcely have enabled Hannibal to poison himself with a drug contained under the stone of a ring.