ways Floregate, Baxtergate, Hakelsou- | tiently and silently. One sees rather than gate, Kirkgate, keep their names with but hears how it is with the pale, sad-looking, slight modification. Kirkgate, it need ill-clad men who wander about by the hardly be said, is Church Street. A curi-lanes and on the cliffs by twos and threes, ous feature of the old town is the wooden galleries which lead to the upper tene ments of houses, which are let in flats. Sometimes you may see three or four of these galleries, one above another, each approached by a flight of wooden steps. As we have said, the houses are built in the cliff side, and the difficulties of such an arrangement are obvious. The yards of Whitby rejoice in such names as Cockpit yard, Elbow yard, Loggerhead yard, Vipond's Lane, and others equally suggestive and euphonious. You may hear the sound of whirring wheels as you pass up and down the narrow ways, and if you do not mind running the risk of being half choked by jet-dust, rouge, lampblack, etc., you will generally find yourself wel come to enter and watch the various processes through which the coal-like mineral passes before it becomes an artistic ornament. So far as I am aware, the question, "What is jet?" has never been quite satisfactorily answered. At one time over twenty jet mines were being worked, needing the labor of from two hundred to three hundred men; but owing to various causes, notably the introduction of Spanish jet, there is a falling off in the quantity of jet extracted from the cliffs and hills of the Whitby district. The Spanish jet in the rough state, of course. is brought to Whitby and sold in large or small quantities, to suit the purchaser. Of late years fortune or fashion has caused considerable fluctuation in the trade, and the distress amongst the poorer jet-workers has often been very great. But it is patiently borne for the most part pa

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few of them being able to turn their hand to any other trade. The making of jet ornaments is an ancient craft. Charlton, in his quaint "History of Whitby," says: "I myself have lately viewed the earring of a lady who had most certainly been buried in one of these houes [houses] long before the time of the Danes' arrival in Britain; it is of jet, more than two inches long, and about a quarter of an inch thick, made in the form of a heart, with a hole to its upper end, by which it has been suspended to the ear. It lay, when found, in contact with the jaw bone, and if any credit be due to antiquity, must assuredly have belonged to some British lady who lived at or before the time the Romans were in Britain, when ornaments of this sort were universally worn." The history of jet from before "the Danes' arrival" to the present day would make a long article of itself, so I must hasten on. Undoubtedly the manufacture of jet orna. ments has been one of the industries of this industrious town for several centuries; as the name of John Carlill, jet worker, 1598, occurs in an old title-deed of a house near the bridge. About 1814 a Frenchman named Bingent, or Bingant, came over from France, and settled in Whitby as a manufacturer of jet, and helped in developing the local trade. And considerable impetus was given to it by the late Lady Normanby, who introduced jet at the court of Queen Victoria. Sub. sequently, for many years, a period of court mourning meant a period of pros perity for the town of Whitby.

INDIAN FISH-EGG FOOD. The Scientific American, in acknowledging the receipt of a specimen of the fish-egg food prepared by the native Indians of British Columbia, says: "The specimen received consists of a small branch of cedar, the leaves of which are thickly coated with dried fish eggs. Our correspondent says the eggs of the specimen sent are from a small fish that abounds in the waters of Vancouver's Sound, and are collected by making a mattress of cedar twigs and sinking them in shallow places until the fish have deposited their spawn, when the twigs are raised and the spawn allowed to dry. When used they are simply soaked and eaten. In this

connection we will give the following item from a correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, who says: During the spring of 1881 the writer was in Sitka, and was a witness to one of the most wonderful sights in the bay of Sitka. For more than a week the water of the bay was as white as milk with fish-spawn extending as far as the eye could see. The herring were so numerous that people were gathering them from the water along the beach with their hands and filling baskets with them. The Indians placed spruce boughs in the water, and when these were taken out not a particle of the original green but what was covered with a thick coating of eggs.""

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Or here, when night was shorn of moon or And Mr. Gladstone is not Pitt,

IT is always pleasant to learn that a man who has filled a prominent part in public estimation has other and sometimes nobler qualities than those which have gained him fame. Many are acquainted with Sydney Smith's witty stories, bril liant repartees, and shrewd sayings, who have never read a line of his Edinburgh Review essays, or heard of "Peter Plym-ple of the country. ley's Letters." Few of the present gen. Hence the publication of such a book eration think of him as a hard-working at this season is opportune. The victory clergyman, as an ardent social reformer, which Sydney Smith helped to win over and as a man who in paths not altogether religious bigotry, over political corruption, to his taste, and not wholly of his choos- over indifference to the welfare of the ing, strove to walk uprightly and manfully under the guidance of an ever-present sense of duty.

ness, and ripening for outbreaks and rev- "No," quietly answered Bobus, as he

olution.

Towards the close of his life he sketched vividly the changes he had witnessed; and that progress has continued with an ever-increasing velocity the last forty

years.

glanced with an innocent air at the phy sician; “No — but yours does!"

"Bobus" Smith was being educated for the bar, and was consuming in this process so large a share of the family funds that Mr. Smith, senior, turned a deaf ear to The following changes have taken place Sydney's request that he also might be since I was born. . . . Gas was unknown. I trained for the law. "You may be," he have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to exclaimed, "a college tutor, or a parson." Calais. It took me nine hours to go from Sydney did not conceal the fact that his Taunton to Bath before the invention of rail- strong preference was for the law, but, ways, and I now go in six hours from Taunton knowing what a drain upon the family to London. In going from Taunton to Bath exchequer Bobus then necessarily was, I suffered between 10,000 and 12,000 severe he sacrificed his own wishes and entered contusions before stone-breaking Macadam the Church. From our point of view be was born. . . . I had no umbrella! I could made a great mistake. He had few of the not keep my small clothes in their proper place, for braces were unknown. Game could not be special spiritual sympathies needful to bought. Quarrels about uncommuted tithes make a good minister of Jesus Christ, and were endless. The corruption of Parliament he appears to have had but a feeble grasp before reform was infamous. There were no of the deeper truths of the gospel, such banks to receive the savings of the poor. The as belief in the guilt of sin, the need of an Poor Laws were gradually sapping the vitals atonement, and the purifying and redeemof the country. Even in the best society one-ing power of the love of Christ. He third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk.

Far as we may be from the social and political millennium, England is much nearer to it than when the little Sydney Smith was surprised by the head master of Winchester constructing a catapult, and received the doctor's congratulations on his skill somewhat awkwardly, since the weapon was intended to slay the great man's best turkey. Sydney longed for the well-fed bird, but he also had an appetite for knowledge, and after reaching the highest point of schoolboy attainment at Winchester passed to Oxford, and in 1789 became fellow of New College.

He owed not a few of his social friendships and not a little of his social prestige to his elder brother Robert, surnamed "Bobus," who after a brilliant course at Eton and Cambridge obtained a lucrative appointment at Calcutta. To him, on the authority of an unpublished MS., Mr. Reid ascribes one of the best of the large collection of Smith stories. In a discussion with Sir H. Holland on the comparative merits of the learned professions in affording agreeable members of society, the latter said, "Your profession (the law) certainly does not make angels of men."

entered the Church because his father wished it, and because the Establishment offered him social status, professional rank, and the possibility of promotion to wealth and power. And thus the English bar lost one who could hardly have failed to occupy a conspicuous place in its brilliant annals, and the English Church gained a parson more celebrated for his power of conversational fence than for exegetical skill, and more addicted to the study of the questions of the day than to the theology of the Thirty-nine Articles.

"The law," he used to say in later days, "is decidedly the best profession for a young man, if he has anything in him. In the Church a man is thrown into life with his hands tied, and bid to swim; he does well if he keeps his head above water."

It is true that Sydney Smith did not do more than swim for some years, nevertheless in the long run he attained to quite as high and quite as prosperous a position in the Church as any reasonable man could expect to reach. He cannot in any way be claimed as a model minister. With the Evangelical School he would have made short work if he could. But Mr.