sloped rapidly into the hillside beneath a murky sheet of water, and was supported by pillars of wide girth; the cavern, with its inclined roof and pillars, half sunk in the water, looked as though it had been rent and submerged by some old earthquake.

Not a vestige of vegetation could we see, save, near the entrance, some dwarfed scolopendriums and pale patches of moss. Not an insect, not indeed any living thing seemed ever to venture down into this dreary den. Away it stretched to the right hand and the left, in long withdrawing vistas of gloom, broken, as we could faintly see, by the light which, entering from other openings along the hillside, fell here and there on some hoary pillar, and finally vanished into the shade.

It is needless to recall what achievements we performed; enough, that, having satisfied our souls with the wonders below ground, we set out to explore those above.

"But where are the petrified forests and fishes?" cried one of the party.

"Here!" "Here!" was shouted in reply from the top of the bank.

We made for the heap of broken stones whence the voices had come, and there, truly, on every block and every fragment the fossils met our eye, sometimes so thickly grouped together that we could barely see the stone on which they lay. I bent over the mound, and the first fragment that turned up (my first-found fossil) was one that excited the deepest interest.

The commander-in-chief of the excursion, who was regarded (perhaps as much from his bodily stature

as for any other reason) an authority on these questions, pronounced my treasure-trove to be, unmistakably and unequivocally, a fish. True, it seemed to lack head and tail and fins; the liveliest fancy amongst us hesitated as to which were the scales; and in after years I learned that it was really a vegetable - the seed-cone or catkin of a large extinct kind of club-moss; but, in the meantime, Tom had declared it to be a fish, and a fish it must assuredly be.

Like other schoolboys, I had, of course, had my lessons on geology in the usual meager, cut-and-dried form in which physical science was then taught in our schools. I could repeat a "Table of Formations," and remembered the pictures of some uncouth monsters on the pages of our text-books -one with goggle-eyes, no neck, and a preposterous tail; another with an unwieldy body, and no tail at all, for which latter defect I had endeavored to compensate by inserting a long pipe into his mouth, receiving from our master (Ironsides, we called him) a hearty rap across the knuckles, as a recompense for my attention to the creature's comfort.

But the notion that these pictures were the representations of actual, though now extinct monsters, that the matter-of-fact details of our text-books really symbolized living truths, and were not invented solely to distract the brains and endanger the palms of schoolboys; nay, that the statements which seemed so dry and unintelligible in print were such as could be actually verified by our own eyes in nature, that beneath and beyond the present creation, in the glories of which we reveled, there lay around us

the memorials of other creations not less glorious, and infinitely older, and thus that more, immensely more, than our books or our teachers taught us could be learnt by looking at nature for ourselvesall this was strange to me. It came now for the first time like a new revelation, one that has gladdened my life ever since..

We worked on industriously at the rubbish heap, and found an untold sum of wonders. The human mind in its earlier stages dwells on resemblances, rather than on differences. We identified what we found in the stones with that to which it most nearly approached in existing nature, and though many an organism turned up to which we could think of no analogue, we took no trouble to discriminate wherein it differed from others. Hence, to our imagination, the plants, insects, shells, and fishes of our rambles met us again in the rock. There was little that some one of the party could not explain, and thus our limestone became a more extraordinary conglomeration of organic remains, I will venture to say, than ever perturbed the brain of a geologist.

It did not occur at the time to any of us to inquire why a perch came to be embalmed among ivy and rose leaves; why a seashore whelk lay entwined in the arms of a butterfly; or why a beetle should seem to have been doing his utmost to dance a pirouette round the tooth of a fish.

These questions came all to be asked afterward, and then I saw how erroneous had been our boyish identifications. But, in the meantine, knowing little of the subject, I believed everything, and with

implicit faith piled up dragon-flies, ferns, fishes, beetle-cases, violets, sea-weeds, and shells.

The shadows of twilight had begun to fall while we still bent eagerly over the stones. The sun, with a fiery glare, had sunk behind the distant hills. The chill of evening now began to fall over everything, save the spirits of the treasure-seekers. And yet they too in the end succumbed. And, as the moanings of the night-wind swept across the fields, it was wisely resolved that we should all go home.

Then came the packing up. Each had amassed a pile of specimens, well-nigh as large as himself, and it was of course impossible to carry everything away. A rapid selection had therefore to be made. And oh with how much reluctance were we compelled to relinquish many of the stones, the discovery whereof had made the opposite, cavern ring again with our jubilee.

Not one of us had had the foresight to provide himself with a bag, so we stowed away the treasures in our pockets. Surely practical geometry offers not a more perplexing problem than to gauge the capacity of these parts of a schoolboy's dress. So we loaded ourselves to the full, and marched along with the fossils crowded into every available corner.

Such was my first geological excursion--a simple event enough, and yet the turning point in a life. Thenceforward the rocks and their fossil treasures formed the chief subject of my every-day thoughts. That day stamped my fate, and I became a geologist.

de cliv'i ty, a downward slope.
er ro' ne ous, false; mistaken.
fos' sil, remains of plants and animals
found buried in the earth.
Gei' kie (ge' ki), a Scottish geologist.

pic' tur esque' (esk'), forming an

interesting or striking picture. pre pos' ter ous, absurd; ridiculous. scol o pen' dri um, a kind of fern. vis' ta, a view through an avenue.

THE SOUTH.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

Fall, thickly fall, thou winter snow!
And keenly blow, thou winter wind!
Only the barren North is yours,

The South delights a summer mind;
So fall and blow,

Both wind and snow,

My Fancy to the South doth go.

Half-way between the frozen zones,
Where Winter reigns in sullen mirth,
The Summer binds a golden belt
About the middle of the Earth.
The sky is soft, and blue, and bright,
With purple dyes at morn and night;
And bright and blue the seas which lie
In perfect rest, and glass the sky.
And sunny bays with inland curves

Round all along the quiet shore;
And stately palms in pillared ranks
Grow down the borders of the banks,
And juts of land where billows roar.
The spicy woods are full of birds,

And golden fruits and crimson flowers; With wreathéd vines on every bough,

That shed their grapes in purple showers. The emerald meadows roll their waves, And bask in soft and mellow light;

The vales are full of silver mist,

And all the folded hills are bright.