THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 9 
a seeker in the dark, that the facts contained in these few sen- 
tences were the patient gatherings of years. 
In the course of the first day’s employment, I picked upa 
nodular mass of blue limestone, and laid it open by a stroke 
of the hammer. Wonderful to relate, it contained inside a 
beautifully finished piece of sculpture —one of the volutes 
apparently of an Ionic capital; and not the far-famed walnut 
of the fairy tale, had I broken the shell and found the little 
dog lying within, could have surprised me more. Was there 
another such curiosity in the whole world? I broke open a 
few other nodules of similar appearance, — for they lay pretty 
thickly on the shore, — and found that there might. In one 
of these there were what seemed to be the scales of fishes, 
and the impressions of a few minute bivalves, prettily striated ; 
in the centre of another there was actually a piece of decayed 
wood. Of all Nature’s riddles these seemed to me to be at 
once the most interesting, and the most difficult to expound. 
I treasured them carefully up, and was told by one of the 
workmen to whom I showed them, that there was a part of 
the shore about two miles farther to the west, where curiously 
shaped stones, somewhat like the heads of boarding-pikes, 
were occasionally picked up; and that in his father’s days 
the country people called them thunderbolts, and deemed 
them of sovereign efficacy in curing bewitched cattle. Our 
employer, on quitting the quarry for the building on which we 
were to be engaged, gave all the workmen a half-holiday. [ 
employed it in visiting the place where the thunderbolts had 
fallen so thickly, and found it a richer scene of wonder than I 
could have fancied in even my dreams. 
What first attracted my notice was a detached group of low 
lying skerries, wholly different in form and color from the 
sandstone cliffs above, or the primary rocks a little farther to 
