could have but got rid of the recollection that it had been scooped out by handfuls for a far different purpose than that of making a grotto, I would have deemed it one of the finest caverns I ever saw. Immediately beside where the vaulted corridor enters the gallery, there is a wide dark chasm in the floor, furnished with a rusty chain-ladder, that gives perilous access to the lower workings of the hill. There was not light enough this evening to show half-way down; but far below, in the darkness, I could see the fiery glimmer of a torch reflected on a sheet of pitch-black water; and I afterwards learned that a branch of the Dudley and Birmingham Canal, invisible for a full mile, has been carried thus far into the bowels of the hill. I crossed over the nest-like valley scooped in the summit of the eminence, a picturesque, solitary spot, occupied by a cornfield, and feathered all around on the edges with wood; and then crossing a second deep excavation, which, like the gallery described, is solely the work of the miner, I struck over a range of green fields, pleasantly grouped in the hollow between the Wren's-Nest-hill and the Castle-hill of Dudley, and reached the town just as the sun was setting. The valleys which interpose between the three Silurian islets of the Dudley basin are also Silurian; and as they have been hollowed by the denuding agencies out of useless beds of shale and mudstone, the miner has had no motive to bore into their sides and bottom, or to cumber the surface, as in the surrounding coal-field, with the ruins of the interior; and so the valleys, with their three lovely hills, form an oasis in the waste.

CHAPTER V.

Dudley; significant Marks of the Mining Town. Kindly Scotch Landlady. Temperance Coffee-house. Little Samuel the Teetotaller. — Curious Incident. — Anecdote. The Resuscitated Spinet. - Forbearance of little Samuel. - Dudley Museum; singularly rich in Silurian Fossils. Megalichthys Hibberti. — Fossils from Mount Lebanon; very modern compared with those of the Hill of Dudley. - Geology peculiarly fitted to revolutionize one's Ideas of Modern and Ancient. Fossils of extreme Antiquity furnished by a Canadian Township that had no name twenty years ago. - Fossils from the Old Egyptian Desert found to be comparatively of Yesterday. - Dudley Castle and Castle-hill. Cromwell's Mission. - Castle finds a faithful Chronicler in an old Serving-maid. Her Narrative. Caves and Fossils of the Castlehill. — Extensive Excavations. - Superiority of the Natural to the Artificial Cavern. - Fossils of the Scottish Grauwacke. Analogy between the Female Lobster and the Trilobite.

THE town of Dudley has been built half on the Silurian deposit, half on the coal-field, and is flanked on the one side by pleasant fields, traversed by quiet green lanes, and on the other by ruinous coal-workings and heaps of rubbish. But as the townspeople are not "lie-wasters," we find, in at least the neighborhood of the houses, the rubbish heaps intersected with innumerable rude fences, and covered by a rank vegetation. The mechanics of the place have cultivated without levelling them, so that for acres together they present the phenomenon of a cockling sea of gardens, a rural Bay of Biscay agitated by the ground-swell,—with rows of cabbages and beds of carrots riding on the tops of huge waves, and gooseberry and currant bushes sheltering in deep troughs and hollows. I marked, as I passed through the streets, several significant traits of the

mining town one of the signboards, bearing the figure of a brawny half-naked man, armed with a short pick, and coiled up like an Andre Ferrara broadsword in a peck basket, indicates the inn of the "Jolly Miner;" the hardware shops exhibit in their windows rows of Davy's safety lamps, and vast piles of mining tools; and the footways show their sprinkling of ruggedlooking men, attired in short jackets and trousers of undyed plaiding, sorely besmutted by the soil of an underground occupation. In some instances, the lamp still sticking in the cap, and the dazzled expression of countenance, as if the eye had not yet accommodated itself to the light, indicate the close proximity of the subterranean workings. I dropped into a respectable-looking tavern to order a chop and a glass of ale, and mark, meanwhile, whether it was such a place as I might convert into a home for a few days with any reasonable prospect of comfort. But I found it by much too favorite a resort of the miners, and that, whether they agreed or disputed, they were a noisy generation over their ale. The landlady, a kindly, portly dame, considerably turned of fifty, was a Scotchwoman, a native of Airdrie, who had long ago married an Englishman in her own country, and had now been settled in Dudley for more than thirty years. My northern accent seemed to bespeak her favor; and taking it for granted that I had come into England in quest of employment, but had not yet been successful in procuring any, she began to speak comfort to my dejection, by assuring me that our country folk in that part of the world were much respected, and rose always, if they had but char acter, into places of trust. I had borne with me, on my homely suit of russet, palpable marks of my labors at Sedgley and the Wren's Nest, and looked, I daresay, rather geological than genteel. Character and scholarship, said the landlady, drawing her inference, were just everything in that neighborhood. Most

of the Scotch people who came the way, however poor, had both; and so, while the Irish always remained drudges, and were regarded with great jealousy by the laboring English, the Scotch became overseers and book-keepers, sometimes even partners in lucrative works, and were usually well liked and looked up to. I could fain have taken up my abode at the friendly Scotchwoman's; but the miners in a neighboring apartment were becoming every moment more noisy; and when they began to strike the table with their fists till the glasses danced and rung, I got up, and, taking leave of my countrywoman, sallied into the street.

After sauntering about the town for half an hour, I found in one of the lanes a small temperance coffee-house, with an air of quiet sobriety about it that at once recommended it to my favor. Finding that most of the customers of the place went into the kitchen to luxuriate over their coffee in front of the fire, I too went into the kitchen, and took my seat on a long wooden settle, with tall upright back and arms, that stretched along the side of the apartment, on the clean red tiles. The English are by much a franker people than the Scotch, - less curious to know who the stranger may be who addresses them, and more ready to tell what they themselves are, and what they are doing and thinking; and I soon found I could get as much conversation as I wished. The landlady's youngest son, a smart little fellow in his ninth year, was, I discovered, a stern teetotaller. He had been shortly before at a temperance meeting, and had been set up to make a speech, in which he had acquitted himself to the admiration of all. He had been a teetotaller for about nine years, he said, and his father was a teetotaller too, and his mother, and brother and sisters, were all teetotallers; and he knew men, he added, who, before taking the pledge, had worn ragged clothes, and shoes without

men.

soles, who, on becoming teetotallers, had improved into gentleHe was now engaged in making a second speech, which was, however, like a good many other second speeches produced in such circumstances, very much an echo of the first; and every one who dropped in this evening, whether to visit the landlady and her daughters, or to drink coffee, was sure to question little Samuel regarding the progress of his speech. To some of the querists Samuel replied with great deference and respect; to some with no deference or respect at all. Condition or appearance seemed to exert as little influence over the mind of the magnanimous speech-maker as over that of the eccentric clergyman in Mr. Fitzadam's World, who paid to robust health the honor so usually paid to rank and title, and looked down as contemptuously on a broken constitution as most other people do on dilapidated means. But Samuel had quite a different standard of excellence from that of the eccentric clergyman. He had, I found, no respect save for pledged teetotalism; and no words to bestow on drinkers of strong drink, however moderate in their potations. All mankind consisted, with Samuel, of but two classes, drunkards and teetotallers. Two young ladies, daughters of the supervisor of the district, came in, and asked him how he was getting on with his speech; but Samuel deigned them no reply. "You were rude to the young ladies, Samuel," said his mother when they had quitted the room; "why did you not give them an answer to their question ?" "They drink," replied the laconic 'Drink!" exclaimed his mother, "Drink! - the young ladies!"—"Yes, drink," reiterated Samuel; "they have not taken the pledge."

Samuel.

I found a curious incident which had just occurred in the neighborhood forming the main topic of conversation,- exactly such a story as Crabbe would have chosen for the basis of a