ave been washed from around them to lower
levels. The boulders, however, which we find scattered over the plains
and less elevated hill-sides, with beds of the washed gravel or sand
interposed between them and the clay, must have been cast down where
they lie, during the elevatory ages. For, had they been washed out of
the clay, they would have lain, not _over_ the greatly lighter sands and
gravels, but _under_ them. Would that they could write their own
histories! The autobiography of a single boulder, with notes on the
various floras which had sprung up around it, and the various classes of
birds, beasts, and insects by which it had been visited, would be worth
nine-tenths of all the autobiographies ever published, and a moiety of
the remainder to boot.

A few hundred yards from the opening of this dell of the boulder-clay,
in which I have so long detained the reader, there is a wooded
inflection of the bank, formed by the old coast line, in which there
stood, about two centuries ago, a meal-mill, with the cottage of the
miller, and which was once known as the scene of one of those
supernaturalities that belong to the times of the witch and the fairy.
The upper anchoring-place of the bay lies nearly opposite the
inflection. A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in this part of the
roadstead, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one
fine evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of his seamen,
who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights that
twinkled from the scattered farm-houses, and in listening, in the
extreme stillness of the calm, to the distant lowing of cattle, or the
abrupt bark of the herdsman's dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
ceased, and the lights disappeared,--all but one solitary taper, that
twinkled from the window of the miller's cottage. At length, however, it
also disappeared, and all was dark around the shores of the bay, as a
belt of black velvet. Suddenly a hissing noise was heard overhead; the
shipmaster looked up, and saw what seemed to be one of those meteors
known as falling stars, slanting athwart the heavens in the direction of
the cottage, and increasing in size and brilliancy as it neared the
earth, until the wooded ridge and the shore could be seen as distinctly
from the ship-deck as by day. A dog howled piteously from one of the
out-houses,--an owl whooped from the wood. The meteor descended until it
almost touched the roof, when a