In short, the young geologist-had he all Europe before him-could hardly choose for himself a better field. I had, however, no one to tell me so at the time, for geology had not yet travelled so far north; and so, without guide or vocabulary, I had to grope my way as I best might, and find out all its wonders for myself. In the course of the first day's employment, I picked up a nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a beautifully finished piece of sculpture - one of the volutes, apparently, of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little dog lying within it, could have surprised me more. Was there such another curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a few other nodules of similar appearance - for they lay pretty thickly on the shore and found that there might be. In one of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated; in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed wood. Of all of nature's riddles these seemed to me at once the most interesting and the most difficult to expound. I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the workmen to whom I showed them that there was a part of the shore, about two miles farther to the west, where curiously shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, were occasionally picked up; and that in his father's days the country people called them thunderbolts, and deemed them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle. Our employer, on quitting the quarry on which we were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday. I employed it in visiting the place where the thunder-bolts had fallen so thickly, and found a richer scene of wonder than I could have fancied in even my dreams. What first attracted my notice was a detached group of lowlying skerries, wholly different in form and color from the sandstone cliffs above, or the primary rocks a little farther to the west. I found them composed of thin strata of limestone, alternating with thicker beds of a black, slaty substance, which, as I ascertained in the course of the evening, burns with a powerful flame, and emits a strong bituminous odor. The layers into which the beds readily separate are hardly an eighth part of an inch in thickness, and yet on every layer there are the impressions of thousands and tens of thousands of the various fossils peculiar to the lias. We may turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of an herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page. Scallops, and gryphites, and ammonites, of almost every variety peculiar to the formation, and at least some eight or ten varieties of belemnite; twigs of wood, leaves of plants, cones of an extinct species of pine, bits of charcoal, and the scales of fishes. And, as if to render their pictorial appearance more striking, though the leaves of this interesting volume are of deep black, most of the impressions are of a chalky whiteness. I was lost in admiration and astonishment, and found my very imagination paralyzed by an assemblage of wonders that seemed to outrival, in the fantastic and the extravagant, even its wildest conceptions. I passed on from ledge to ledge, like the traveller of the tale through the city of statues, and at length found one of the supposed aërolites I had come in quest of firmly embedded in a mass of shale. But I had skill enough to determine that it was other than what it had been deemed. A very near relative, who had been a sailor in his time, on almost every ocean, and had visited almost every quarter of the globe, had brought home one of these meteoric stones with him from the coast of Java. It was of a cylindrical shape and vitreous texture; and it seemed to have parted in the middle, when in a half-molten state, and to have united again, somewhat awry, ere it had cooled enough to have lost the adhesive quality. But there was nothing organic in its structure, whereas the stone I had now found was organized very curiously indeed. It was of a conical form and filamentary texture, the filaments radiating in straight lines from the centre to the cir cumference. Finely marked veins, like white threads, ran transversely through these in its upper half to the point, while the space below was occupied by an internal cone, formed of plates that lay parallel to the base, and which, like watch-glasses, were concave on the under side, and convex on the upper. I learned in time to call this stone a belemnite, and became acquainted with enough of its history to know that it once formed part of a variety of cuttle-fish, long since extinct. RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES. MILNES, RICHARD MONCKTON (created BARON HOUGHTON in 1863), an English poet; born at London, June 19, 1809; died at Vichy, August 11, 1885. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, took his degree in 1831, and then travelled on the European continent and in the East. In 1837 he entered the House of Commons, of which he remained a member until his elevation to the peerage in 1863. He put forth several volumes of poems, among which are "Memorials of a Tour in Greece" (1834); "Memorials of a Residence on the Continent" and "Historical Poems (1838); "Poetry for the People" (1840); "Memorials of Many Scenes" (1843); "Palm Leaves," "Poems Legendary and Historical," and "Poems of Many Years" (1844); "Good-Night and Good-Morning" (1849); "Monographs, Personal and Social" (1873); and "Poetical Works" (1876). In 1848 he published "The Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats," and in 1862 edited the "Poems of David Gray," with a prefatory memoir. He was also the author of several political pamphlets. THE WORTH OF HOURS. BELIEVE not that your inner eye For every man's weak self, alas! Makes him to see them while they pass, But if in earnest care you would Those surely are not fairly spent And, more though free from seeing harm, THE LONG-AGO. ON that deep-retiring shore In the griefs of Long-ago. Tombs where lonely love repines, Wake the sleep of Long-ago! Though the doom of swift decay GOOD-NIGHT AND GOOD-MORNING. A FAIR little girl sat under a tree, Then smoothed her work, and folded it right, Such a number of rooks came over her head The horses neighed and the oxen lowed: She did not say to the Sun, "Good-night," The tall pink foxglove bowed his head- And while on her pillow she softly lay She knew nothing more till again it was day: And all things said to the beautiful sun, Good-morning! good-morning! our work is begun." NAPLES AND VENICE. OVERLOOKING, Overhearing, Naples and her subject bay, |