Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/243

Rh other viands, were incomparably better cooked than in corresponding places in England, and the variety was greater than is common in many middle-class houses. The ordinary supper of the "roughs" above named was of three courses: first a minestra, i. e., a soup of some kind, continually varied, or a savory dish of macaroni; then a ragout or savory stew of vegetables and meat, followed by an excellent salad; the beverage a flask of thin but genuine wine. When I come to the subject of cheese, I will describe their mode of cooking and using it.

My first walk through Italy extended from the Alps to Naples, and from Messina to Syracuse. I thus spent nearly a year in Italy, during a season of great abundance, and never saw a drunken Italian. A few years after this I walked through a part of Lombardy, and found the little osterias as bad as English beer-shops or low public-houses. It was a period of scarcity and trouble; "the three plagues," as they called them—the potato-disease, the silk-worm fungus, and the grape-disease—had brought about general privation. There was no wine at all; potato-spirit and coarse beer had taken its place. Monotonous polenta, a sort of paste or porridge made from Indian-corn meal, to which they give the contemptuous name of miserabile, was then the general food, and much drunkenness was the natural consequence.

Referring to No. 17 of this series (November "Monthly"), a correspondent who has just returned from Norway, where he followed the route of my last trip there, reminds me of the marvelous congregation of sea-birds that assembles on some of the headlands of the Arctic Ocean, and suggests that egg-oil might be obtained in large quantities there. He quotes from the work of P. L. Simmonds on "Waste Products" the following: "In the Exhibition of 1862 the Russian Commission showed egg-oil in large quantities and of various qualities, the best so fine as to far excel olive-oil for cooking purposes"; but it was not sufficiently cheap for general use.

Among the places indicated by Mr. Grimwood Taylor, the most remarkable is Sverholt Klubben, a grand headland between the North Cape and Nord Kyn, rising precipitously from the sea to a height of above one thousand feet. The face of the rock weathers perpendicularly, forming a number of ledges about two or three feet above each other, and extending laterally for more than a mile. On the two occasions when I passed it, the whole of this amphitheatre was occupied by a species of gull, the "kittiwake," perched on the ledges, their white breasts showing like the shirt-fronts of an audience of a million or two of male pygmies in evening dress. On blowing the steam-whistle, the rock appeared to advance, and presently the sky was darkened by a living cloud, and every other sound was extinguished by a roar of wings and the harsh, wailing screams of a number of birds that