Page:First impressions of England and its people.djvu/100

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF

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

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