LONDON GOSSIP.

Mb Stead, an earnest sympathiser in tht work of the Salvation Army, and an ardent admirer of the late Mrs Booth, says : " The Array could no more have come into existence without her than could the family of sons and daughter! who are now carrying on the salvation work all over the world. It was Mn Booth who made the "Army the great instrument that it has been of revealing to the world the capacities and resources of her own sex. She was the most retiring and modest of women. At one time the thought of speaking in public terrified her like a nightmare. She fought against the call as long as she dared, and when she gave way at last it was with positive anguish of soul, and not a little feeling of distress, that so heavy a- burden should have been laid upon her. She never dared to speak in the presence of her husband. Down to quite recent times hie would open the meeting and then retire. But she got over that in time, as she did much else. _ She suffered, too, - from physical weakness. Frequently after a meeting she would spend hours labouring with penitents, and, then go home to writhe in agony from spasms of the heart. She was a very human woman." - Superior people sneer at the Lord Mayor's Show. Whilst admitting- it is not a very imposing spectacle, it ought not to be forgotten that it gives thousands of poor people whose lives are as uneventful and dim as those of caterpillars an opportunity of seeing a little colour and pomp. This year the procession of Balaclava veterans in cairiages garre a pathetic interest to the show. There was, of course, the usual crowding,- the usual horseplay, and the usual disturbance of public business. When Mr Augustus Harris became a London County Councillor, you felt that the stage had made a tremendous step in social advance ; bnt whon the same genial gentleman blossomed into a Sheriff, gold chain, badge and all, you knew that, given ordinary luck, the popular lessee of Old Drury would one day ride in the Lord Mayors carriage, with the Civic chain over his breast, and the gorgeous robinga of the Chief Magistrate round his portly person. May I be there to see! The function of inauguration was a very grand one, and our new sheriff had his lacqueys arrayed in most gorgeous livery, historically revived by Mr Seymour Lucas. When Drury Lane ig rebuilt — an event ' in the near future— it will probably be constructed, outside, on the plan of the Mansion House! The election of Mr Harris has given unqualified satisfaction. The Btudy'of medicine is rapidly shifting its most important studies to a new plane, situated far down in the world of invisible things, and the microscope, in the hands of experts, has become man's strongest ally in his fight against the manifold diseases by which he is environed. Bacteriology ig a science still in its infancy, but the study of it has already conferred enormous benefits'- on the human race. We are now able to look to a time when such maladies as cholera, typhus fever, and the •whole brood of malarious fevers shall 1 have been conquered by science. ■ The extraordinary panic which prevailed on the New York Stock Exchange on November 10, apparently was without adequate cause. ■ Prices ' rattled down as though a rising in the Southern States bad been imminent. The depression which still hangs over the London financial world seems to have been the chief motive for an exhibition of comparative insanity that only the sudden death of one of a wellknown dealer in stocks checked.