the patriarchs are sufficient to illustrate; and
were without competition, if it could be made
out that Adam was buried near Damascus,
according to some tradition. But though earth
hath engrossed the name, yet water hath proved
the smartest grave; which in forty days swallowed
almost mankind, and the living creation;
fishes not wholly escaping, except the salt-ocean
were handsomely contempered by a mixture of
the fresh element."

The list of earth's usefulness is not easily
exhausted. Earth supplies colours for painting,
as ochre, umber, and ultramarine, besides
numerous brilliant metallic compounds; materials
for pipes, bricks, pottery, tiling, pavements,
statuettes, crockery, and artificial gems; the
means of cleaning and polishing, as "French
chalk," Bath-brick, tripoli, fullers'-earth; aids
to both defensive and offensive military operations,
from Uncle Toby's fortifications to General
Todleben's earthworks; a simple cement,
for grafting, to wit, and for stopping beer-
barrels; as medicine, like magnesia, chalk,
collyrium, and Armenian bole; for thrashing-floors,
garden-walks, ant-hills, and savages' huts. There
is even eatable earth which, taken into the
stomach, lulls, if it do not satisfy, the cravings
of hunger.

Before altogether quitting the Earth, we will,
in the second chapter, go a little deeper into it,
following the itinerary of three recent travellers.

STADDON FARM.

HOUSES, especially country houses, have for
me a peculiar attraction, inasmuch as I often
fancy that I find in them, as one does in human
faces, a character and expression all their
own, and quite apart from their beauty or ugliness,
or the degree of liking I may have for
those that live in them.

It is this character, fanciful or not, which
makes the image of many a house which was
familiar to me in my old South Cove life, cling
so pertinaciously to my remembrance, that often
with very little encouragement, or no encouragement,
its likeness starts out of the mist of the
past and claims recognition, although no pains
nor pleasures of my own, or of those I loved,
are graven on its face.

Such a house was Staddon Farm; a prim
little grey homestead, now existent only in
the remembrance of a few old prosers like
myself, but which, in the days of my youth, was
nested high among the tufted hill's that overlooked
the sea some half-mile from my home.

Staddon had no architectural beauty to boast
of, though its antiquity was not of mushroom
date, for it had been in the old time an out-
lying farm, on the skirts of the fair demesne
belonging to a great monastery miles inland.
The narrow maze of winding lanes, full of violets
and briar-roses in spring, and, it must be owned,
dripping deep with mud all the winter long,
which we called Staddon lanes, ran twisting
and twining through a deep ferny rocky dell,
overhung with aged ashes and elms, the special
haunt of innumerable blackbirds, whose sweet
broken questions and answers, now coaxing,
now mocking, now exulting, might be heard
there all the day long, and pretty nearly all
the year through. Then, the path crossed a tiny
tinkling brook, which a few steps higher up
made a portentous amount of bustle and
scurry round a corner formed by a mossy lump
of grey rock, and gave itself vastly conquering
airs among the stepping-stones, especially after
a hard shower of rain. Up the hill-side, among
a cluster of other hills soft and bossy with
golden furze, went Staddon-lane, and ended at
the farm-yard wall and the narrow ivied door
with the treacherous high stone threshold.

The farm-yard went shelving down-hill to the
dwelling-house, which stood in a dip on the
further side, and a very noisy untidy old-world
sort of farm-yard, I must needs own, it was;
rudely and only half paved; sloppy, and strewn
with litter; and above all, rendered terrible to
me in the remotest days of my acquaintance
with it, by threatening visions of a truculent
mother-sow, whose family broils seemed never
off her mind, and by the apparition of a hideous
white calf with one black eye, which persisted in
charging at me with tail erect from the open
cow-house door. There was a slender grey
tower—thrashing-floor below, pigeon-house
above—which stood in one corner of the farm-
yard; a bell had probably once hung in its upper
story, and, though it showed no other sign of
having served for religions purposes, it was
invariably called "the chapel." The answer
often given by a farm-servant to inquiries after
the master of the house, to the effect that
"Maister be gwayn to chapel," only signified
that the master of Staddon, Mr. Isaac Dart,
must be looked for within the low-arched doorway
of the little tower, ever resonant with the
cooing and whirring of pigeons, and the dull
heavy rhythm of flails.

The way from the farm-yard to the front
entrance lay between hen-houses and pigsties,
and the outhouse where old Croppy the donkey
abode, and skirted the kitchen-door, beside
which an immense blush-rose-bush overspread
the wall and touched the low eaves of the
roof. Then, turning a sharp corner, one stood
on the narrow paved path which ran along the
front of the house, where the low windows of
the best rooms looked across a straight stripe of
border, filled always (as it seemed to me) with
the gayest and most glowing flowers, and a
decrepit dwarf wall that bounded it, to the soft
wavy perspective formed by the turfy dip
between the hills, in the middle distance of which
grew a weird old ash-tree, all knotted and
gnarled, as if its woody joints were deformed by
cramps and rheumatisms. And away beyond,
and far below, the pale turquoise blue of the sea
shimmered as with diamond-dust till it met the
pearly sky horizon.

Staddon used to be the goal of many of our
walks, when, under the convoy of kind sandy-
haired long-suffering Miss Chamberlayne, our