been lying in Portland Island ever since St.
Paul's was built. They are covered with
lichen, but not a chisel mark has mouldered
out of sight, while fellow portions of such
columns which are exposed to the south
and south-west wind in Saint Paul's churchyard
have lost all sharpness of outline. Then
there is the magnesian limestone, separated by
the lower beds of new red sandstone from
the coal. Westminster Hall is a London
fragment of magnesian limestone, brought
from the quarries of Huddlestone, near
Sherborne. The New Houses of Parliament
form a more recent specimen, of which it
must be a proud thing to a chemist to feel
that they provide for the legislature of Great
Britain a grand temple of chalk and magnesia.
The magnesian limestone used in the
building of the Houses of Parliament, whereof
there are to be had an infinity of chips, is
brought from Bolsover in Derbyshire, and its
extreme durability is attested by the fresh
look of a church at Southwell, in Nottinghamshire,
built of the same stone some nine
hundred years ago.

The decay of rocks, as well as many various
kinds of them, may be examined also in our
London graveyards. Every tombstone is a
study for geologists.

The green-sand, which is exposed in cliffs
on the south side of the Isle of Wight, is
brought to the surface in London by deep
borings for Artesian wells. Above the greensand,
and immediately below the London clay,
is the great chalk formation, represented in
the milk of the metropolis. As for the London
clay, we case ourselves in that, for it is
represented in the London bricks. Finally,
there lies over all the alluvium, the London
soil, the deposit going on in our own day.
This is certainly a thing which no man will
quit London to see, but which he must quit
London not to see, the more's the pity.

A DREAM.
ALL yesterday I was spinning,
Sitting alone in the sun;
The dream that I spun was so lengthy,
It lasted till day was done.
I heeded not cloud or shadow
That flitted over the hill,
Or the humming-bees or the swallows,
Or the trickling of the rill.
I took the threads for my spinning,
All of blue summer air,
And a flickering ray of sunlight
Was woven in here and there.
The shadows grew longer and longer,
The evening wind passed by,
And the purple splendour of sunset
Was flooding the western sky.
But I could not leave my spinning,
For so fair my dream had grown,
I heeded not, hour by hour,
How the silent day had flown.
At last the grey shadows fell round me,
And the night came dark and chill,
And I rose and ran down the valley,
And left my dream on the hill.
I went up the hill this morning
To the place where my spinning lay,
There was nothing but glistening dewdrops
Remained of my dream to-day.

HALF A LIFE-TIME AGO.
IN FIVE CHAPTERS. CHAPTER I.

HALF a life-time ago there lived a single
woman, of the name of Susan Dixon, in one
of the Westmoreland dales. She was the
owner of the small farm-house where she
resided, and of some thirty or forty acres of
land by which it was surrounded. She had
also an hereditary right to a sheep-walk,
extending to the wild fells that overhang
Blea Tarn. In the language of the country,
she was a Stateswoman. Her house is yet
to be seen on the Oxenfell road, between
Skelwith and Coniston. You go along a
moorland track, made by the carts that
occasionally come for turf from the Oxenfell. A
brook babbles and brattles by the way-side,
giving you a sense of companionship which
relieves the deep solitude in which this way
is usually traversed. Some miles on this side
of Coniston there is a farmstead,— a grey
stone house and a square of farm-buildings
surrounding a green space of rough turf, in
the midst of which stands a mighty, funereal,
umbrageous yew, making a solemn shadow,
as of death, in the very heart and centre of
the light and heat of the brightest summer
day. On the side away from the house, this
yard slopes down to a dark-brown pool, which
is supplied with fresh water from the
overflowings of a stone cistern, into which some
rivulet of the brook before mentioned continually
and melodiously falls and bubbles.
The cattle drink out of this cistern. The
household bring their pitchers and fill them
with drinking water by a dilatory, yet pretty,
process. The water-carrier brings with her
a leaf of the hound's-tongue fern, and, inserting
ing it in the crevice of the grey rock, makes
a cool green spout for the sparkling stream.

The house is no specimen, at the present
day, of what it was in the lifetime of Susan
Dixon. Then, every small diamond pane in
the windows glittered with cleanliness. You
might have eaten off the floor; you could see
yourself in the pewter plates and the polished
oaken awmry, or dresser, of the state kitchen
into which you entered. Few strangers
penetrated further than this room. Once or
twice, wandering tourists, attracted by the
lonely picturesqueness of the situation, and
the exquisite cleanliness of the house itself,
made their way into this house-place, and
offered money enough (as they thought), to
tempt the hostess to receive them as lodgers.
They would give no trouble, they said; they
would be out rambling or sketching all day