lewan, where, sheltered from the sun, yet open
to the breeze, they cook and dine, and smoke
and sleep. Here the young damsels work and
wash, while the poultry cluck and crow, and
the infants crawl and fight. Except in the short
rainy season, and during the few cold nights,
people spread their mats and quilts, which our
Bible calls their beds, either on the plaster
floor, or under the branching vine, and the whole
family lie down together, father and mother,
son and daughter, with their wives and
husbands, and their brood of little ones. Knowing
no shame the darkness covers them with its
robes. When the night grows chill, and the
fear of dysentery comes down upon them, they
creep into one of their tiny rooms, closing the
doorway with a hanging mat, just as their fathers
closed the Tabernacle entrance with a veil.
Into their rooms a stranger rarely, if ever,
enters. An outer stair leads up to the flat
roof; and on the lewan itself a visitor hangs
his lantern. The rooms are plain and empty;
having none of the pretty trifles which adorn
an English home. Books, pictures, vases,
chairs, pianos, clocks, are never to be seen in a
Syrian's house. The walls are bare; the floors
are mud. A couch is laid along the wall;
being a lounge by day, a bed by night. A
lamp of red clay, a wooden stand, a cradle, a
chibouque, a corn mill, a cruse of water, make
up the list of furniture. Most of the work is
done away from home; either in the fields, the
bazaars, or in the sooks. A goldsmith has his
forge, a cobbler his stall, a tailor his goose, in
the bazaar; while a carpenter puts his bench,
and a barber his basin in the public way. A
man's house is neither his workshop nor his
place of reception, as it is so often with a
Frank. Fear lest his women should be seen
prevents a Syrian from bringing home his friends,
except on the three or four grand solemnities of
his life. Can he not see his brother in the
mosque; his neighbour in the market? There
is not much news to relate. When a new Pasha
comes to Damascus, when a Maronite sheikh
burns a Druse village, when a Salhaan bandit
murders and robs a Frank, can he not hear of
it in the city gate? It was in such a house,
squat and bare, with an open roof, a plaster
floor, a little court or garden looking over the
Wady Cedron, the Dead Sea, and the Moab
mountains, that Martha and Mary lived, and
that JESUS, on his visits to the Holy City,
lodged. Going every morning into Jerusalem
to teach and preach, he walked back to Bethany
in the afternoon, that he might sup and sleep
among the poor. It is nowhere hinted that he
stayed in Jerusalem a single night."

Such pictures as these bring the facts of
olden times more vividly before our minds than
was ever dreamt of by the school of idealists.
The realistic tendencies of the day, and the
desire to strip off all false tinsel and made
up appearances, which Hunt, among others, has
expressed in painting, Mr. Dixon has expressed
in writing; and as any damage done to the
"skewer and blanket " school is a gain to the
world at large, so these pictures of our Saviour's
actual life are valuable in that sense if in no
other.

SARDINES AND ANCHOVIES.

THE sardine season begins in November.
Early in the month which the Saxons called
the wind month (wint monat), and Englishmen
speak of as the fog month, when—

                   the long vacation's o'er,
And lawyers go to work once more,—

the Lord Mayor's show is seen in London,
and the silvery sardines glitter in the nets
of fishermen on the shores of England and
Scotland, of the Channel, and the
Mediterranean. On the southern and western coasts
of England sardines have been so plentiful
sometimes, that farmers and hop-growers have
fertilised their fields with them. Sardines
have been pitchforked from carts laden with
tons of them upon the fields of Kent; and
spread over the fields as the November winds
scatter the many-coloured leaves of the fall of
the year. When sardines may have been so
cheap as to be sold as manure on the coast, the
price demanded for them in Piccadilly has been,
as we remember it was some twenty years ago,
nothing less than half a guinea a box! The
Lady Juliet, if she had set up housekeeping
with her Lord Romeo, might have seen that
there is a good deal in a name, and learnt, as a
frugal housewife, that there is a vast difference
in the price of the same little fish when it is
called a sardine, and when it is called a sprat.
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet,
and Romeo would have been himself whatever
his name, but it is doubtful if sprats called
sprats would ever have fetched the price of ten
shillings and sixpence a box.

Sardines are sprats. When it was believed
that these little fishes were extremely and pre-
eminently abundant on the coasts of Sardinia,
they were called sardines. "Sprat" is the
English, "garvie" the Scotch, and "sardine" the
French name of Clupea sprattus. The herring,
the pilchard, the sprat, the whitebait, the
anchovy, the Twaite shad and the Alice shad, have
been grouped together by systematic students of
fishes. The sardine is so like the pilchard that
it appears to differ from it only by being smaller.
Young herrings are sometimes cured and sold
as sardines. Pilchards and herrings are similar
in size; but the pilchards have larger and
broader scales, they have thicker backs, and
straighter lines on the back and belly. If you
hang a pilchard by the dorsal fin it hangs even,
but if you hang a herring by the dorsal fin it
hangs top-heavy. The sprat, according to Mr
J. M. Mitchell, in his Natural History of the
Herring, is known from the young herring by
having the belly serrated with thirty-three bony
points, and the ventral fins nearer the head.
The body of the young herring is more flattened
or less round than the body of the sprat, and