been raised to the use of boiled milk, on the grounds of its unwholesomeness are not regarded, by those best qualified to form an opinion, as proven. Some years ago, after the National Health Society had circulated a leaflet which I wrote for them on the advisability of boiling all milk before use, I was invariably confronted with arguments as to its unfitness for children on account of its indigestible character. My personal experience is, however, quite contrary, and although the use of raw milk has been for years most rigorously prohibited, none of the evil results foretold have resulted. 6 This question has, however, been thoroughly investigated by the present Director of the Institut Pasteur, Dr. Duclaux, who published a short time ago an exhaustive article on La digestibilité du lait stérilisé,' in which he carefully examines and weighs all the facts which have arisen, and reviews the numerous special researches which have been made in connection with this subject. I cannot do better than quote some of the words with which he concludes his article: Ceci nous amène,' he writes, 'à une conclusion qu'il faut bien avoir le courage de tirer, c'est que ces études chimiques sur la digestibilité du lait ne sont pas adéquates à la question à résoudre. . . . . . En attendant, tenons-nous-en à cette conclusion générale, que le lait pasteurisé, chauffé ou stérilisé, est encore du lait, devant la science comme devant la pratique, et que si son emploi présente parfois des inconvénients, ceux-ci sont légers et amplement compensés par les avantages.' G. C. FRANKLAND. 1896 A NORTHERN PILGRIMAGE LONDON was hot-very hot. The season was growing stale. 'No more dining out,' said the wise physician; 'try a few days in a bracing atmosphere.' A bracing atmosphere! I drew in a long breath of the tepid air. I might have been inside an oven. Where, at such a time as this, was there anything that could truly be called bracing to be found short of the Arctic Circle? And then in a blessed moment of inspiration there suddenly flashed upon me the vision of my native county-practically unseen for two-and-thirty years. As in a dream I saw the league-long roller breaking in silver on the iron coast, and heard the plovers calling on the rolling moorlands that look down on Coquet and Aln, and felt the city of my youth quivering beneath the blows of her clamorous iron flail.' Unseen for two-and-thirty years, and the generation I had known gone from it for ever, all the dear remembered faces of my childhood vanished with it! It was the memory of that generation that stood between me and the place I longed to see again. How could a man go back to the old home that was home no longer? But out of the far-off past came a sudden call before which my hesitation vanished-a call that found an echo in my heart; and thus it came about that, four-and-twenty hours later, I found myself seeking repose in the Station Hotel at Newcastle-on-Tyne. One station hotel resembles another as closely as twin peas in the pod. When I breakfasted next morning in the coffee-room there was nothing in my surroundings to remind me of the town once so familiar. That which struck me was the distinctly cosmopolitan air of the company at breakfast. At one table they were talking Russian, at another Spanish, whilst at a third, a demure Japanese with almond-shaped eyes was studying the menu. It was not thus in the early sixties; but since then the world has discovered Newcastle, and has learned what the men of the Tyneside can do for it. By-and-by some neighbouring chairs were filled by a party of honest country-folk, and then there fell upon my ears the long-lost music of the Northumbrian tongue-the rolling gutturals, the sing-song cadence, that can be heard nowhere else in this world. I knew that I was at home at last. The Central Station at Newcastle, familiar to all who take the East Coast route to Scotland, is a vast bewildering place. The great bridge by which it is approached, spanning the Tyne at a height of more than a hundred feet above high water mark, the blackened Norman keep that guards its portals, give it an air of distinction that no London railway station can command. It is the same station that I saw opened to the world more than six-and-forty years ago, when the opening ceremony consisted of a dinner to Robert Stephenson, the famous son of a still more famous father. But it has been more than doubled in size since then, and where once there was comparative spaciousness and leisure, there is now crowding and bustling, such as even Charing Cross cannot show. One was bewildered by the labyrinth of sidings and main lines that covered the vast roofed-in area. This after all was not the station I had once known. Out in the streets the landmarks of my youth were still to be seen. The noble lantern tower of St. Nicholas-the most graceful edifice of the kind in England-remained unchanged, though in my absence the building it adorns had been transformed from a mere parish church into a cathedral. Grey Street, the thoroughfare which Newcastle owes to the genius and courage of Richard Grainger, and which is a glorified Regent Street in stone instead of stucco, was as stately as of yore; and the other well-planned harmonious thoroughfares that once made the town an example to the cities of the earth, were what they used to be. But now hurrying crowds filled the pavements, whilst beyond this central portion of the city spread a vast town of which I knew nothing. It had more than doubled in population since I last dwelt within its walls, and the area it covered had increased in a still larger proportion. As I wandered through the once-familiar streets that morning, or traversed new thoroughfares where houses had taken the place of hedge-rows, effacing the meadows where I had played as a child, two lines of Tennyson's were constantly running in my brain : There rolls the deep where grew the tree. The deep seemed to have rolled above my own head. Like Esmond at his mother's grave, I felt as one who walked beneath the sea. It was sad enough to have to go to the quiet cemetery beside the moor, in order to find one's friends. It touched one's heart to the quick to stand again before the house that had once been a home, and to find that, instead of the far-reaching prospect over hill and moor and sea, all that the dwellers in it could now command was the other side of the way.' But these are the necessary incidents of a return after so long an absence, and being in the nature of private griefs they can hardly be obtruded here. There was much, however, in this new view of a place which still dwelt freshly in my memory, as I had known it in 1860, that had a more public interest. It was impossible not to be struck by the immense advance in material wealth and luxury of life that had taken place in the interval. There were fewer ragged children in the streets. The houses were bigger and better decorated. The shops were infinitely better supplied than of yore. There were many handsome carriages. There was a general air of prosperity about the place that was not to be mistaken, and that I had not known in the past. For that prosperity Newcastle is largely indebted to the genius of one man. As a youth I remember a plain house in Westgate Street, upon the door of which was a worn brass plate bearing the words, Mr. Armstrong, solicitor.' The Mr. Armstrong of forty years ago was an eminently respectable member of his profession. Some good people, it is true, shook their heads when they heard that instead of attending to conveyances and writs and mortgages, he had taken to dabbling in mechanics. Not that way does fortune lie in the profession of the law. But one day I was taken as a boy to see a remarkable new toy— it seemed nothing more-that had been placed upon the Quayside at Newcastle, where a few small steamers and Dutch merchantmen were in the habit of coming with cargo. It looked like a metal box, with some curious handles not unlike water-taps, upon the lid. A goodnatured workman turned one of these handles, and lo! as he did so, a great crane hard by rattled its chain, and slowly but surely swung a heavy load into the air. It was like magic. Now try it yourself,' said the man, as he stopped the movement of the crane. Timidly I moved the handle, and straightway the miracle was repeated. touch of a child the heavy load was at once borne upwards. dune by watter,' said the man, and it's Armstrong the solicitor in Westgate Street that's invented it.' That was the first hydraulic crane. At the It's arl 'Mr. Armstrong, solicitor,' had found his true calling in life. He still kept up the practice of his profession. But he bought a small bit of ground by the side of the Tyne, away from the town on the Scotswood Road, and there he raised a modest building within which the manufacture of his new hydraulic machinery was undertaken. I remember the place well. Many a time I accompanied my father on a round of pastoral calls among the plain people who lived at Elswick, in small cottages with little gardens attached, in which marigolds and carnations bloomed, and the fragrant lad's love was invariably to be found. There are no gardens there now. From that humble beginning of more than forty years ago has sprung the vast Elswick establishment, which knows only one rival in Europe. Fifteen thousand workmen are busy from day to day at furnace, forge, and lathe. Where once the flowers bloomed and the cattle fed on the riverside meadows there is now a range of industrial buildings a mile in length; and a whole town has grown up in that which I can still remember as rustic Elswick- the place where as a boy I roamed in the fields, or rowed in one of Harry Clasper's boats upon the river. Of course the place had begun to make great strides forward before I left Newcastle in 1862. The famous rifled gun had been invented, and was becoming almost as important an article of manufacture as the hydraulic cranes and rams. But since then the development of the establishment has been almost appalling, and I could not recognise the scenes once so familiar. It is Mr. Armstrong, solicitor,' now Lord Armstrong, who has given the impetus to the industrial progress of the Tyne. He is the magnet who draws to the old town that cosmopolitan company I noted at the breakfast table. But it is not my business to describe the vast Elswick works, the greatest of their kind in the United Kingdom, if not in the world. I have but to note them among the many changed features in the life of Newcastle. Incidentally they have brought about another change, not less remarkable than the creation of the great industrial suburb of Elswick. I have said that as a boy I have spent many an hour rowing on the Tyne opposite the place where the Elswick works now present their mile-long frontage to the stream. At that time it was almost possible to cross the river dry-shod at low water. The King's Meadows, where the buttercups bloomed in profusion among the grass, formed a group of islets in mid-stream, and no vessel of heavier burden than the characteristic keel of the Tyne-the subject of the familiar song 'Weel may the keel row'-was ever to be seen above the old bridge. Now the King's Meadows have disappeared; the river has been deepened from its mouth to far above Elswick; the old Tyne bridge has been removed, a huge swing bridge moved by hydraulic power taking its place, and great battleships-ships as big as the ill-fated Victoria-are not only built at Elswick, but are able to traverse the river safely from that spot to the sea. The story of what has been done for the Clyde by local spirit and engineering genius is matter of history. It is not so generally known that a work at least as great has been done for the Tyne. The river I could have waded across as a boy now bears ships of thousands of tons burden at any state of the tide. I watched with amazed eyes the opening of the huge swing bridge to allow a great ocean steamer to pass down stream. It was swung by a single man just as easily as the hydraulic crane which once stood hard by was moved by my fingers as a boy, and, like the crane, it was the offspring of the brain of the Newcastle solicitor. Politics! One cannot keep away from them even on a holiday. Of late years Newcastle has been chiefly known in the political world in connection with the name of John Morley, its representative in four successive parliaments. But my Newcastle dates from a time when Mr. Morley was still unknown, and it is with other names that I connect it. Between the fifties and sixties Newcastle had a distinguished son, of whom it was half proud, and perhaps a trifle |