Pilchards thus prepared are called fumadoes,
—a name they have retained since the
days when they used to be smoke-dried, or,
more probably they were so called by the
foreign purchasers, who, never having visited
Cornwall, supposed them to be so
prepared. Among the fishermen they go by the
name of fair maids,—evidently a corruption
of fumades, as the sailors of the trading
vessels would be sure to call them, with
their usual ingenuity in Anglicising foreign
languages

There is a great scarcity in the market at
present, and great is the desire of the
different seine-companies to get their fish
into the market first. However, as most of
them were caught at about the same time,
and will most probably be ready about the
same time, too, the price will very soon fall.
The southern coast will have a slight
advantage, because the fish make their
appearance there first, and then pass west-
ward round Land's End and up the northern
coast, and then turn back. The northern
coast, however, gets the finer fish.

Immense numbers of pilchards have been
caught this year already, not only by the
seines, but by the driving boats, who
do not bulk them, but sell them at once
on the shore at the landing-place, or
send them in carts to the towns inland.
The seine-boats occasionally sell at the
landing-place, too; the difference being, that
in a couple of thousand bought of a driver,
there may be a great number of inferior fish,
—scads, and such like; while all those
bought of a seine must be pilchards.

A seine is considered to make a good shot
when it encloses somewhere about a couple
or three hundred hogsheads, though more
are frequently caught. There is a tradition
that the seine of a gentleman called
Rashleigh once brought up two thousand five
hundred hogsheads at a catch! "But that,"
as our informant said, "was in the good old
days of seining;" and we humbly suppose it
was at that time, if it ever was. From the
same source we learn that sixty thousand
hogsheads have been taken off Cornwall in
one season; but we believe it was when the
fish used to visit the coast in winter as well
as summer,—a habit of which, we grieve to
say, they have broken themselves for some
considerable period. This year, however, the
fish seem getting back to the good old days
of seining; for they are in finer condition,
larger, more numerous, and closer
inshore than they have been for thirty years:
as is allowed on all sides.

They are very beautiful fish to look at,—
not very large, but silvery bright, with a
tinge of pink in the scales here and there,
and with very large, lustrous, gold and black
eyes. But, to add still more to their beauty
(according to that very old proverb, Beauty
is as beauty does), they are called the poor
man's fish. Not only do the poor make a
cheap and hearty meal off pilchards, but are
clothed, and housed, and warmed by the
money brought in by the fishery; and in
every place where a few hundred hogsheads
of pilchards have been caught and bulked, a
few hundred pounds have found their way
into the pockets of the poor.

So, at the end of the season, the little
village on the sea coast, which (at the beginning
of this paper) woke up to find itself very
busy, goes to sleep again with the comfortable
assurance that it has money enough in
its pocket, not, perhaps—to eat, drink, and be
merry withal, but at least to keep famine
and cold from the door during the next
winter, thanks to the poor man's fish.

WHERE I FOUND AN OWL'S NEST.

IMMEDIATELY behind the city of Trebizond
there arises a singular eminence: the Mount
Mithrios of history, and the Boz Tépé (or
grey hill) of the modern Turks. Its summit
is considerably elevated above the level of
the sea; but the great extent of its base
diminishes its apparent height. Its surface
is pretty generally covered by short
grass, from which, here and there, huge
masses of dark rock crop out, and from
which numerous springs issue. Near the
base, upon the seaward side, one of these
masses forms the trapezoid site of the ancient
citadel from which the place derives its name;
and this site, having from time immemorial
divided the water that constantly rushes
down from above, and having forced it to
find channels to the right and left, is now
isolated between two deep and picturesque
ravines, spanned by bridges for the traffic of
the city, and through which trickling rills,
changed sometimes into foaming torrents,
find the end of their course in the waters of
the Euxine. Lower still, between the ravines
as they diverge, with the trapezoid rock
rising perpendicularly behind it, and the sea
washing its feet, stands the Turkish town—
ts lofty walls bearing witness to the revolutions
of the past. Here, the perfection of
the masonry tells of Roman handiwork;
there, the fragment of a sculptured capital,
or the shaft of a marble column, tells of
repairs executed with relics that only barbarism
could have so employed. Here, a stone of
unusual size bears a time-worn Latin or
Greek inscription; there, where a similar
stone has been removed, the spectator may
read, upon a substitute thrust loosely into its
place, the exultation of a Mahometan victor, or
a sentence selected from the Koran. Upon the
beach, a modern battery exhibits unmistakeable
evidence of the late Czar's sick man. Its
embrasures are filled up at the back by wooden
screens, much the colour of the masonry, and
on each screen there is painted a black circle,
intended to look like the muzzle of a gun,
and to strike awe into the hearts of the