l carbonic acid, melts a tiny grain of
chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid hill by one of the
million pores and veins which at once feed and burden my springs. Ages
on ages I have worked on thus, carrying the chalk into the sea. And ages
on ages, it may be, I shall work on yet; till I have done my work at
last, and levelled the high downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of
flint gravel rattling in the shallow waves.

She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would surely
think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and then of the
graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see
how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as vast and wonderful,
Madam How's work is than that of man.

But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could not tell
you. For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees,
and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would have no soul; no reason;
no power to say why.

It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at least
listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps--I can only say
perhaps--that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea
between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow
into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of
men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a
nobler destiny before it. That may happen to it, which has happened
already to many a grain of lime. It may be carried thousands of miles
away to help in building up a coral reef (what that is I must tell you
afterwards). That coral reef may harden into limestone beds. Those beds
may be covered up, pressed, and, it may be, heated, till they crystallise
into white marble: and out of it fairer statues be carved, and grander
temples built, than the world has ever yet seen.

And if that is not the reason why the chalk is being sent into the sea,
then there is another reason, and probably a far better one. For, as I
told you at first, Lady Why's intentions are far wiser and better than
our fancies; and she--like Him whom she obeys--is able to do exceeding
abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or think.

But you will say now that we have followed the chalk-cart a long way,
without coming to the cave.

You are wrong. We have come to the very mouth of the cave. All we have
to do is to say--not "Open Sesame," like Al