xi!.] THE STOEY OF A PEBBLE. 297 



shame the meanness of my imagination, by the awful 

 magnificence of God's facts, and say to me : 



" Ages and ^Eons since, thousands on thousands of 

 years before there was a man to till the ground, I the 

 little pebble was a living sponge, in the milky depths 

 of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds of living 

 atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's 

 dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multi- 

 plied, till I became a tiny hive of wonders, each one of 

 which would take you a life to understand. And then, 

 I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell you you will 

 never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin 

 gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all 

 my inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud 

 settled round us, I know not how, and covered us in ; 

 and for ages on ages I lay buried in the nether dark, 

 and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was cracked 

 and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again 

 I have been part of an island, and then again sunk 

 beneath the sea, to be upheaved again after long 

 centuries, till I saw the light once more, and dropped 

 from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high 

 hills which have long since been swept off the face of 

 the earth, and was tossed by currents till I became a 

 pebble on the beach, while Reading was a sand-bank 

 in a shallow sea. There I lay and rolled till I was 

 rounded, for many a century more ; till flood after 

 flood past over me, and a new earth was made ; and I 

 was mixed up with fresh flints from wasting chalk- 

 hills, and with freestones from the Gloucestershire 

 wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the mountains 

 of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned 

 elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; 



