The 12th and 13th of November saw the city again en fète to celebrate the opening of the Grand Trunk between Toronto and Montreal, which terminated on the 12th in a banquet at Point St. Charles with 4,000 present. The evening of the 13th closed with a promenade through the brilliantly illuminated city with the roar of cannon at intervals and a great ball. On November 5th a violent hurricane swept over Montreal and on December 10th Christ Church Cathedral was burnt down. This year the additions and new works of Montreal waterworks were being made ready for use. The cause of science received a great impetus in the city by the convention which started on Wednesday, August 12, 1857, of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and was continued for a week, during which the University of McGill, the Natural History Society and other learned organizations entertained their distinguished guests. In September of the same year the Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition was successfully held. On September 7th 500 of the Thirty-ninth Regiment left Montreal for active service, for this was the year of the Indian mutiny. Educational circles remember the year of the meeting in Montreal of the American Association for the Advancement of Learning and as the opening of the Jacques Cartier and the McGill Normal schools for teachers. This was practically the earliest converging point of the two boards of school commissioners in the building up of their educational system. January 1, 1858, marks the supplanting of the L.S.D. system by the decimal coinage; January 5th, the purchase of the Montreal and Bytown (Ottawa) Railway for £5,300 by Mr. (afterward Sir John) J.J.C. Abbott. On February 26th, Griffintown was flooded and beds stood three feet in water, being one of the annual spring floods. The martial enthusiasm of the citizens was evoked in the city in the early part of 1858 by the Indian mutiny, when the Imperial Government accepted the offer of a regiment to be raised in Canada for service abroad under the title of the “One Hundredth Prince of Wales Royal Canadian Regiment.” The recruiting sergeant, with his flying ribbons, fife and drum band and his cry of “Come, boys, and join the war,” was a novelty then. Montreal contributed for the first overseas contingent 110 young men, who drilled with the detachment of 500 men on St. Helen’s Island previous to being embarked for England in July following. This was the first contingent raised for the front, but it did not get as far as India, doing duty at Malta and Gibraltar. None the less, as the old ballad says, “Their will was good to do the deed, that is if they’d have let ’em, with a ‘Re fol de roy, etc.’” On September 1st the laying of the first Atlantic telegraph cable was celebrated in the city by trades, military and torchlight processions, the latter being two miles long on the average of six abreast. A bonfire on the mountain signalized this occasion.