II. 

 THE PEBBLES IN THE STREET. 



IF you, dear reader, dwell in any northern town, you 

 will almost certainly see paving courts and alleys, and 

 sometimes to the discomfort of your feet whole 

 streets, or set up as bournestones at corners, or laid in 

 heaps to be broken up for road-metal, certain round 

 pebbles, usually dark brown or speckled gray, and ex- 

 ceedingly tough and hard. Some of them will be very 

 large boulders of several feet in diameter. If you 

 move from town to town, from the north of Scotland 

 as far down as Essex on the east, or as far down as 

 Shrewsbury and Wolverhampton (at least) on the west, 

 you will still find these pebbles, but fewer and smaller 

 as you go south. It matters not what the rocks and 

 soils of the country round may be. However much 

 they may differ, these pebbles will be, on the whole, 

 the same everywhere. 



But if your town be south of the valley of the 

 Thames, you will find, as far as I am aware, no such 

 pebbles there. The gravels round you will be made 

 up entirely of rolled chalk flints, and bits of beds 



