WILLIAM SMITH. 265 



may now be the accommodations at this village, 

 they were very wretched in 18 19 (December), but 

 the odd stories of supernatural beings and incre- 

 dible frights which were narrated by the villagers 

 assembled at the little inn, greatly amused Mr. 

 Smith, and reminded him of exactly parallel tales 

 which circulated around Whichwood Forest in his 

 boyhood. 



" The next morning we walked to Kettering, 

 noticing on the road the peculiar characters of 

 the Northamptonshire oolite. In this walk Mr. 

 Smith had somehow sprained or over-fatigued him- 

 self, and he chose to proceed to Wellingborough 

 in a chaise. From this point, situated on sand of 

 the oolite series, we resumed our geological pro- 

 ceedings on foot, and passing by Irchester, Wool- 

 aston, and Boziate, traversed in the next hills the 

 oolite, the forest marble, the cornbrash, and an 

 outlier of Kelloway's rock. The road up Boziate 

 Hill was mantled with fossiliferous stone, some of 

 which, obtained from the hill-top, was believed to 

 be Kelloway's rock, and was found to contain 

 Ammonites sublcBvis and other fossils. A fine 

 specimen of this ammonite was here laid by a par- 

 ticular tree on the road side, as it was large and 

 inconvenient for the pocket, according to a custom 

 often observed by Mr. Smith, whose memory for 

 localities was so exact, that he has often, after 

 many years, gone direct to some hoard of this 

 nature, to recover his fossils. This road, however, 

 over Boziate Hill, he was not to travel again. 



