o lay open the wound every
year, for an exfoliation;" and his life was eventually shortened by his
sufferings. All seemed comfortable enough, and quite quiet enough, in
the bishop's country-house to-day. There were two cows quietly chewing
the cud in what apparently had been the dignitary's sitting-room, and
patiently awaiting the services of a young woman who was approaching at
some little distance with a pail. A large gray cat, that had been
sunning herself in a sheltered corner of the court-yard, started up at
our approach, and disappeared through a slit hole. The sun, now gone far
down the sky, shone brightly on shattered gable-tops, and roofless,
rough-edged walls, revealing many a flaw and chasm in the yielding
masonry; and their shadows fell with picturesque effect on the loose
litter, rude implements, and gapped dry-stone fence, of the neglected
farm-yard which surrounds the building.

I have said that the flat promontory occupied by the ruin is edged by
hills of indurated sand. Existing in some places as a continuous bed of
a soft gritty sandstone, scooped wave-like a-top, and varying from five
to eight feet in thickness, they form a curious example of a sub-aerial
formation,--the sand of which they are composed having been all blown
from the sea-beach, and consolidated by the action of moisture on a
calcareous mixture of comminuted shells, which forms from twenty to
twenty-five per cent. of their entire mass. I found that the sections of
the bed laid open by the encroachments of the sea, were scarce less
regularly stratified than those of a subaqueous deposit, and that it was
hollowed, where most exposed to the weather, into a number of spherical
cells, which gave to those parts of the surface where they lay thickest,
somewhat the aspect of a rude Runic fret-work,--an appearance not
uncommon in weathered sandstones. With more time to spare, I could fain
have studied the deposit more carefully, in the hope of detecting a few
peculiarities of structure sufficient to distinguish sub-aerially-formed
from subaqueously-deposited beds of stone. Sandstones of sub-aerial
formation are of no very unfrequent occurrence among the recent
deposits. On the coast of Cornwall there are cliffs of considerable
height that extend for several miles, and have attained a degree of
solidity sufficient to serve the commoner purposes of the architect,
which at one time existed as accumulations of blown sand. "It is around
the promontor