is his duty, and none other's, to re-cover
them decently and to patch up the holes
discreetly.

A LADY ON THE PEAK OF
TENERIFFE.

"YES," says Mr. Piazzi Smyth— he who has
gone to photograph by the light of magnesium
wire the inner chambers of the great pyramid—
"Yes, my wife and I, and the great telescope,
the Pattinson equatorial, all lived up on the
Peak, nearly eleven thousand feet above the sea
level, for over twenty days, not to speak of
more than a month previously spent by the same
party, minus that particular telescope, on a
sister peak at a smaller height of nine thousand
feet. And my wife was under canvas too, with
nothing but a wall of rough stones to keep tent
and all from being carried down into the cloud
sea that lay some five thousand feet below us."

"She must have been a woman in a million,"
says Joblings. But then Joblings is a heretical
old bachelor. Every one of us married men
knows one wife at least who would have gone up
with her husband, if it was only to "see that he
didn't get into mischief;" but not many, we
fancy, would, like Mrs. Piazzi Smyth, have
themselves proposed to take neither table nor chair,
and endured to sit on boxes, and eat off packing-
cases.

Before we go up the mountain with the
Edinburgh astronomer, let us have a word or
two about these "Fortunate Islands," so well
known to the ancients, so thoroughly forgotten
till quite late on in the middle ages. Pliny,
who wrote about everything— he used to stop
his litter at every "object of interest" that he
passed, and straightway book it in his journal,
writing himself to ensure greater correctness,
and not after the usual Roman fashion, by means
of a slave-amanuensis— Pliny tells us all about
the Canaries. The old Greeks called them the
"Islands of the Blessed;" but Phœnician skippers
soon found out that there were no more
ghosts there than elsewhere. Juba of
Mauritania, Pliny's authority, had been there; and
had brought home two of the big dogs for which
they were famous. It is the dogs, and not the
birds, which gave them their name.

The newspapers told us how the Cape Verde
Islands suffered lately from a killing drought:
a very dry year may at any time inflict a like
calamity on the Canaries. The most eastern
island is still an active volcano. The Peak itself
is only dormant: in 1705 it sent forth terrible
lava streams, which swept right over the town
of Garachico, and filled up the only decent
harbour in the island; and it has been at
work several times since. Very little is
produced in the islands since the vine disease.
Canary wine is pretty nearly gone; Falstaff now-
a-days drinks pale brandy and "bittah beah;"
he lisps, does the modern Falstaff, and is
altogether a very different person from honest
old Jack. Cochineal aud its cactus are fast
superseding the vine. Canary-birds, however,
are not likely to become extinct; in their
native islands they sing on the wing; each flock
is said to have its own peculiar song, but we
must not think the "jonques," so popular
among us, form the majority in a flock. A
mixture of brown and olive green and greyish
yellow is the prevailing colour. That bright
yellow tint is a disease, stamping exceptional
beauty on the sufferer; just as the hectic flush
makes a common-place face look handsome.
The first ship-load of canaries brought to
Europe was wrecked off Elba; this was towards
the beginning of the sixteenth century. The
birds escaped for the time; but they were
eagerly hunted through Elba till not one
of them was left. Spitalfields and Norwich
are great places for rearing and teaching
canaries. The Norwich men have generally
voted for the sturdier dark-coloured birds; the
Spitalfields men prefer the "jonques." The
price which a journeyman weaver will give for
a well-trained bird would astonish a lady who
thinks three half-crowns "quite enough" to pay
for a canary.

And now what took the "great equatorial"
and lots of scientific gear— electrometers,
thermomultipliers, wet and dry bulb
thermometers of all kinds— to this out-of-the-way
quarter? It was Sir Isaac Newton who
had been pointing out the way for a long time.
What the Bible says of men of faith is true also
of men of science— being dead, they yet speak.
Just a hundred and thirty years before Mr.
Piazzi Smyth sailed, Newton had written thus:
"Telescopes cannot be so formed as to take
away that confusion of rays which ariseth from
the tremors of the atmosphere. The only
remedy is a most serene and quiet air, such
as may, perhaps, be found on the tops of the
highest mountains, above the grosser clouds."

Astronomers had often wanted to follow out
Sir Isaac's hint; but it is an expensive affair to
carry a big telescope to the top of a mountain—
your mountain, too, must be in the tropics, or
else no one could live long enough at its top to
make a proper series of observations. At last,
in 1856, the Astronomer Royal persuaded the
Lords of the Admiralty to give five hundred
pounds— a sum small, indeed, compared with
what they spend in altering some ship, well
enough as it is, into something else that it was
never meant to be— but still a great deal to be
given in a lump "for scientific purposes."
Whatever virtue may be, science in England is
generally her own reward. This five hundred
pounds was to pay for "a scientific mission
to the Peak of Teneriffe." Many friends lent
instruments; and Robert Stephenson offered
his yacht (fancy old Stephenson's son having a
yacht!); else we don't think Mr. Smyth would
have done it at the price: certainly he would not
have managed so well as he did, for the car-
penter and second mate of the Titania were
invaluable in contriving house accommodation
on the mountain; our blue-jackets being
proverbially able to turn their hands to anything,