the West, rivers as vast as the Amazon, the Missis sippi, or the Orinoco are now; and so in long ages, upon the top of the limestone and upon the top of the mill-stone grit, were laid down those beds of coal which you see burnt now in every fire.

But how did the coral-reefs rise till they became cliffs at Bristol and mountains in Yorkshire?

The earthquake steam, I suppose, raised them. One earthquake indeed, or series of earthquakes, there was, running along between Lancashire and Yorkshire, which made that vast crack and upheaval in the rocks, the Craven Fault, running, I believe, for more than a hundred miles, and lifting the rocks in some places several hundred feet. That earthquake helped to make the high hills which overhang Manchester and Preston and all the manufacturing county of Lancashire. That earthquake helped to make the perpendicular cliff at Malham Cove, and many another beautiful bit of scenery. And that and other earthquakes, by heating the rocks from the fires below, may have helped to change them from soft coral into hard crystalline marble as you see them now, just as volcanic heat has hardened and purified the beautiful white marbles of Pentelicus and Paros in Greece, and Carrara in Italy, from which statues are carved unto this day. Or the same earthquakes may have heated and hardened the limestones simply by grinding and squeezing them; or they may have been heated and

hardened in the course of long ages simply by the weight of the thousands of feet of other rock which lay upon them. For pressure, you must remember, produces heat. When you strike flint and steel together, the pressure of the blow not only makes bits of steel fly off, but makes them fly off in red-hot sparks. When you hammer a piece of iron with a hammer, you will soon find it get quite warm. When you squeeze the air together in your pop-gun, you actually make the air inside warmer, till the pellet flies out, and the air expands and cools again. Nay, I believe you cannot hold up a stone on the palm of your hand without that stone after a while warming your hand, because it presses against you in trying to fall, and you press against it in trying to hold it up. And recollect above all the great and beautiful example of that law which you were lucky enough to see on the night of the 14th of November, 1867, how those falling stars, as I told you then, were coming out of boundless space, colder than any ice on earth, and yet, simply by pressing against the air above our heads, they had their motion turned into heat, till they burned themselves up into trains of fiery dust. So remember that wherever you have pressure you have heat, and that the pressure of the upper rocks upon the lower is quite enough, some think, to ac count for the older and lower rocks being harder than the upper and newer ones.

But why should the lower rocks be older and the upper ones newer? You told me just now that the high mountains in Wales were ages older than Windsor Forest upon which we stand: but yet how much lower we are here than if we were on a Welsh mountain.

Ah, my dear child, of course that puzzles you, and I am afraid it must puzzle you still till we have another talk; or rather it seems to me that the best way to explain that puzzle to you would be for you and me to go a journey into the far West, and look into the matter for ourselves; and from here to the far West we will go, either in fancy or on a real railroad and steamboat. before we have another talk about these things.

Now it is time to stop. Is there anything mure you want to know? for you look as if something was puzzling you still.

Were there any men in the world while alı this was going on?

I think not. We have no proof that there were not but also we have no proof that there were; the cave-men, of whom I told you, lived many ages after the coal was covered up. You seem to be sorry that there were no men in the world then.

Because it seems a pity that there was no one to see those beautiful coral-reefs and coal-forests.

No one to see them, my child? Who told you that Who told you there are not and never have been any

rational beings in this vast universe, save certain weak, ignorant, short-sighted creatures shaped like you and me? But even if it were so, and no created eye had ever beheld those ancient wonders, and no created heart ever enjoyed them, is there not One Uncreated who has seen them and enjoyed them from the beginning? Were not these creatures enjoying themselves each after their kind? And was there not a Father in heaven who was enjoying their enjoyment, and enjoying too their beauty, which He had formed according to the ideas of His Eternal Mind? Recollect what you were told on Trinity Sunday-That this world was not made for man alone: but that man, and this world, and the whole universe was made for God for He created all things, and for His pleasure they are, and were created.

CHAPTER X.

FIELD AND WILD.

WHERE were we to go next? Into the far

West, to see how all the way along the railroad the new rocks and soils lie above the older, and yet how, when we get westward, the oldest rocks rise highest into the air.

Well, we will go but not, I think, to-day. Indeed I hardly know how we could get as far as Reading; for all the world is in the hayfield, and even the old horse must go thither too, and take his turn at the haycart. Well, the rocks have been where they are for many a year, and they will wait our leisure patiently enough: but Midsummer and the hayfield will not wait. Let us take what God gives when He sends it, and learn the lesson that lies nearest to us. After all, it is more to my old mind, and perhaps to your young mind too, to look at things which are young and fresh and living, rather than things which are old and worn and dead. Let us leave the old stones, and the old bones, and the old

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