18 THE NATURAL HISTORY 



fire with steel. Being often found in broad flat pieces, 

 it makes good pavement for paths about houses, never 

 becoming slippery in frost or rain ; is excellent for dry 

 walls, and is sometimes used in buildings. In many 

 parts of that waste it lies scattered on the surface of the 

 ground ; but is dug on Weaver's-down, a vast hill on the 

 eastern verge of that forest, where the pits are shallow, 

 and the stratum thin. This stone is imperishable. 



From a notion of rendering their work the more 

 elegant, and giving it a finish, masons chip this stone 

 into small fragments about the size of the head of a large 

 nail ; and then stick the pieces into the wet mortar along 

 the joints of their freestone walls ; this embellishment 

 carries an odd appearance, and has occasioned strangers 

 sometimes to ask us pleasantly, " whether we fastened 

 our walls together with tenpenny nails." 



LETTER V 



Among the singularities of this place the two rocky 

 hollow lanes, the one to Alton, and the other to the 

 forest, deserve our attention. These roads, running 

 through the malm lands, are, by the traffic of ages, and 

 the fretting of water, worn down through the first 

 stratum of our freestone, and partly through the second ; 

 so that they look more like water-courses than roads ; and 

 are bedded with naked rag for furlongs together. In 

 many places they are reduced sixteen or eighteen feet 

 beneath the level of the fields ; and after floods, and in 

 frosts, exhibit very grotesque and wild appearances, from 

 the tangled roots that are twisted among the strata, and 

 from the torrents rushing down their broken sides ; and 

 especially when those cascades are frozen into icicles, 



