e, as it is increasing year by year.
The Fish Quay at North Shields is a sight worth seeing; and, in the
herring season, it is increasingly frequented by Continental buyers.

The fortunes of South Shields and Jarrow, though these towns are not in
Northumberland, are yet so bound up with the story of the Tyne that no
one would ever think of that river without them. Especially is this the
case with Jarrow, which "Palmer's" has raised from a small colliery
village to a large and flourishing town. In those famous yards,
everything that is necessary for the building of the largest ironclad,
from the first smelting of the ore until the last rivet is in place, can
be done. All Northumbria--Northumbria in the ancient and widest sense
of the word--owes a debt of gratitude to Jarrow, for was it not the home
of Bede? The monk of Jarrow, who spent all his long life in the same
monastery by the Don, coming to it when he was a child of ten, made that
spot of Northumbrian ground famed to the farthest limits of the
civilized Europe of his day; and scholars from all over the Continent
came to learn at the feet of the Northumbrian teacher. Beloved and
revered by all, and in harness to the last hour of his busy life, he
died in the year 735, just one hundred years after the coming of Aidan
to Lindisfarne. "First among English scholars, first among English
theologians, first among English historians, it is in the monk of
Jarrow that English literature strikes its roots."--_J.R. Green_.

The Jarrow of to-day, and all its neighbours of industrial Tyneside,
possess no beauty of aspect such as the towns that are more fortunately
situated on the upper reaches of the river; they are muffled in clouds
of smoke and soot, and darkened by the necessities of their toil in
grimy ores and the ever-present coal. But no one who has ever looked on
these smoky reaches of the Tyne with a seeing eye, or steamed down the
river on a day either of gloom or sunshine, can refuse to acknowledge
that it has a certain grandeur, a stern beauty of its own, that can stir
the heart and the imagination more deeply than any mere prettiness.

From the numberless hives of activity on both sides of the river clouds
of smoke roll heavily upward, and jets of steam from panting machinery
leap up in momentary whiteness on the dark background; the white wings
of flocks of wheeling gulls flash in the occasional sunshine which
lights up the scene, and between the clouds there are