The next scene of this fishing panorama is the herring banquet or feast, where the king, or mayhap the rich owner of a fleet of busses, sits grandly at table, with his wife and daughter, attended by a butler and a black footman, partaking of the first fruits of the fishery. After this follows a view of the fishmarket, with portraits of the fishwives, and altogether thoroughly indicative of their peculiar way of doing business, which is always the same, whether the scene be laid in ancient Holland or in modern Billingsgate. Next comes a picture of the various buyers of the commodity on their way home, of course by the side of a canal, with their purchases of deep-sea, shore, state, and red herrings. The next scene of the series is a smoking-house, partially obscured by wreaths of smoke, where the herrings are being red-ed; and the series is appropriately wound up with a tableau representing the important process of repairing the damaged nets—the whole conveying a really graphic, although not very artistic, delineation of this highly characteristic Dutch industry. A few plates illustrative of the whale-fisheries of Holland are appended to the series I have been describing—for whale-fishing in the seas of Greenland was also in those days one of the industries of the hardworking Dutch. The old saying that Amsterdam was built on herring bones frequently used to symbolise the fishing power of Holland. It is thought that the industry of the Dutch people was first drawn to the value of the sea fisheries by the settlement of some Scottish fishermen in their country. I cannot vouch for the truth of this statement as to the Scottish emigration, but I believe it was a Fleming who first discovered the virtues of pickled herrings, and it is also known that the capture of the herring was a chief industry on the sea-board of all the Low Countries, and it is likewise instructive to learn that at a time when our own fisheries were very much undeveloped the Dutch people found our seas to be a mine of gold, so productive were they in fish, and so famous did the Dutch cure of herrings become. We are not called on, however, to credit all the stories of miraculous draughts taken, and store of wealth garnered up, by the plodding Hollanders. We must bear in mind that when the Dutch began to fish the seas as a field of industry were nearly virgin, and that that people had at one time this great source of wealth all to themselves. At that particular period, likewise, there was no limit to the supply, the fishermen having but to dip their nets in the water in order to have them filled. No wonder, therefore, that the fisheries of Holland grew into a prominent industry, and became at one time the one absorbing hobby of the nation. Busses in large fleets were fitted out and manned, till in time the Dutch came to be reputed as the greatest fishers in the world. But great as was the fishing industry of those