And watched the minnows poise and shoot,
And heard the robin lave his wing:

But the stranger's bucket is at the spring.

5. O ye who daily cross the sill,

Step lightly, for I love it still;

And when ye crowd the old barn eaves,
Then think what countless harvest sheaves
Have passed within that scented door
To gladden eyes that are no more.

6. Deal kindly with those orchard trees;
And, when your children crowd your knees,
Their sweetest fruit they shall impart,
As if old memories stirred their heart:
To youthful sport still leave the swing,
And in sweet reverence hold the spring.

LANGUAGE STUDY.

I. Write the analysis of: lowly; stranger; mournful; painful; childhood; lightly; gladden; kindly; reverence.

II. What two adjectives are formed by adding the suffix y to nouns? Analyze the following complex exclamative sentence:

"O ye who daily cross the sill,

Step lightly, for I love it still!"

III. To what class of composition does this poem belong? (See Definition 17.) Point out where the poet changes from description to a reflective tone. Transpose into the prose order,

"Between broad fields of wheat and corn
Is the lowly home where I was born."

"There bubbles the shady spring below.'

59.- Glimpses of Science.

MY FIRST GEOLOGICAL EXCURSION.

a-mássed', heaped up in mass. ex-tinet', not now living. an-teri-or (Latin comparative of pet'ri-fied, converted into stone.

This account of the boyish excursion which determined the bent of his after career is by Archibald Geikie, a distinguished Scotch scientist, and professor of geology in the University of Edinburgh.

(4) treasure-trove: treasure once hidden, but now found (retrieved).

1. We started off about noon; a goodly band of some eight or nine striplings, with two or three hammers, and a few pence amongst us, and no care to be home before dusk.

2. The four miles seemed to shrink into one, and we arrived at length at the quarries. They had been opened, I found, along the slope of a gentle declivity. At the north end stood the kilns where the lime was burned, the white smoke from which we used to see when miles away. About a quarter of a mile to the south lay the workings; and there too stood the engine that drew up the wagons and pumped out the water.

3. "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.

4. I bent over the mound, and the first fragment that turned up (my first-found fossil) was one that excited the deepest interest. Tom, the commander in chief, pronounced my treasure-trove to be unmistakably 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 mean time, Tom had declared it to be a fish, and a fish it must assuredly be.

5. Like other schoolboys I had, of course, had my lessons on geology. I could repeat a "Table of Formations," and remembered the pictures of some uncouth monsters on the pages of our text-books.

6. 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 of schoolboys; that beneath and beyond the present creation there lay around us the memorials of other creations not less glorious, and infinitely older; and thus that more, immensely more, than our books taught us could be learned by looking

at nature for ourselves, all this was strange to me. It came now for the first time like a new revelation,one that has gladdened my life ever since.

7. We wrought on the rubbish heap most lustily, 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. 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, than ever perturbed the brain of a geologist.

8. It did not occur at that 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 afterwards, and then I saw how egregiously erroneous had been our identifications. But in the mean time, knowing little of the subject, I believed everything, and with implicit faith piled up dragon flies, ferns, fishes, beetle cases, seaweeds, and shells.

9. The sun, with a fiery glare, had sunk behind the distant hills. The chill of an evening late in autumn fell over everything, save the spirits of the treasure seekers; and yet they too in the end succumbed.

10. The ring of the hammer became less frequent, and the shout that announced the discovery of each fresh marvel seldomer broke the stillness of the scene; and as the night wind swept across the fields, and rustled fitfully among the withered weeds of the quarry, 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.

11. Despite our loads, we left the quarry in high glee. Arranging ourselves into a concave phalanx, with the speaker in the center, we resumed a tale of thrilling interest, that had come to its most tragic part just as we arrived at the quarry several hours before. It lasted all the way back, beguiling the tedium, darkness, and chill of our four-mile journey; and the final consummation of the story was artfully reached just as we got to the door of the first of the party, who had to wish us good-night.

12. Such was my first geological excursion, — a simple event enough, and yet it was the turning point in my life. From that day onward, the rocks and their fossil treasures formed the chief subject of my everyday thoughts. I might have been a merchant, or a banker, or a lawyer, as others of the party have successively become; but that day stamped my fate, and I became a geologist.

13. And yet I had carried home with me a strange medley of errors and misconceptions. Nearly every

fossil we found was incorrectly named.

We believed