Whether the Comet has come or not,—and they seem to
have a private conviction, in Ireland at least, that he has visited that favoured island,—there is no doubt as to the glowing character of the summer, or the general effect which it has had upon the most important article of agriculture. If blight has appeared during the present year, its effects have evidently been partial. The rapid ripening of the growing crop is the subject of general remark in all directions of our own country. But what is more, a similar report is transmitted from most foreign countries. The large supplies, with notifications that there is more where those came from, backed too by the large and glowing reports of the crops in America, have already told upon the price of American wheat and flour in the English market. In the Mediterranean, "heavy arrivals" have checked the speculative tendency ; France and Genoa are still consuming, but Egypt is rapidly supplying. In Holland and in Belgium the markets "have receded " ; at Hamburg the season is said to be "magnificent," the crops " colossal " ; Russia boasts of large supplies to send ; and the
• circle is rounded by the continuance of the most brilliant accounts from Canada. It is under the pressure of this intelligence that at last bread in London has begun to fall a halfpenny the loaf— only, we believe, the first downward move of the food thermometer.
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