CHAP. xni. THE EDGE OF THE PRECIPICE. 175 



the boulder clay. I went into the ravine, and stood 

 looking round me. No sight could give me so much 

 pleasure and surprise. I found, on walking along the 

 little rill, that there was a tiny cascade about eight or 

 nine feet deep, down which the mossy water leapt dash- 

 ingly over a perpendicular wall of real, blue, stony, 

 boulder clay ! 



" I advanced to the brink of the waterfall, and there 

 again I stood, and looked, and wondered ! Never was 

 mortal so enchanted. Boulder clay on each side, all 

 fretted with ' barley mill ' fragments of shells, pieces of 

 Cyprina, and blue stones, pebbly fragments, standing 

 half out, half in, as thick as locusts. And the wide sea 

 immeasurably far away ! 



"I looked down, and saw distinctly shells, commi- 

 nuted shells, studding the clay at the foot of the water- 

 fall, and the steep sides of a section beyond it, to the 

 very edge of the precipice. I wished to jump down, 

 but, like the cautious puddock, I reflected ' how was I 

 to get up again ?' The sides of the small chasm were as 

 perpendicular as a wall, and nearly as hard. I tried my 

 hammer and old knife on the hard clay beside me, and 

 it put me to a swither. 



" Yet I must get down ; and at length I determined tc 

 try. Observing that the bank or section of boulder clay, 

 nearly at the very edge of the precipice, on the east 

 side, was a little lower than the rest, I resolved to go 

 down there. I thought that, by digging steps for my 

 feet, I should doubtless get up again. 



" It was a venture, let me tell you. One false step, and 



