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counties. Unlike our Scotch grauwacke, however, I found that almost every fragment of the mass contained its fossil,—some ill-preserved terebratula or leptæna, or some sorely weathered coralline: but all was doubtful and obscure; and I looked round me, though in vain, for some band of lime compact enough to exhibit in its sharp-edged casts the characteristic peculiarities of the group. A spruce wagoner, in a blue frock much roughened with needle-work, came whistling down the hill beside his team, and I inquired of him whether there were limestone quarries in the neighborhood. "Yez, yez, lots of lime just afore thee," said the wagoner; "can't miss the way, if thou lookest to the hill-side." I went on for a few hundred yards, and found an extensive quarry existing as a somewhat dreary-looking dell, deeply scooped out of the acclivity on the left, with heaps of broken grass-grown debris on the one side of the excavation, and on the other a precipitous front of gray lichened rock, against which there leaned a line of open kilns and a ruinous hut.

The quarriers were engaged in playing mattock and lever on an open front in the upper part of the dell, which, both from its deserted appearance and the magnitude of its weather-stained workings, appeared to be much less extensively wrought than at some former period. I felt a peculiar interest in examining the numerous fossils of the deposit,—such an interest as that experienced by the over-curious Calender in the Arabian Nights, when first introduced into the hall of the winged horse, from which, though free to roam over all the rest of the palace, with its hundred gates and its golden doors, he had been long sedulously excluded. I had now entered, for the first time, into a chamber of the grand fossiliferous museum,—the great stone-record edifice of our island,—of which I had not thought the less frequently from the circumstance that I