her, and she of him. They will get on together rarely;
she as his ever beneficent mother; he as her mouthpiece, her conscious
self, her minister and interpreter.

ON A PIECE OF CHALK [57]

If a well were sunk at our feet in the midst of the city of Norwich, the
diggers would very soon find themselves at work in that white substance
almost too soft to be called rock, with which we are all familiar as
"chalk."

Not only here, but over the whole county of Norfolk, the well-sinker
might carry his shaft down many hundred feet without coming to the end
of the chalk; and, on the sea-coast, where the waves have pared away
the face of the land which breasts them, the scarped faces of the high
cliffs are often wholly formed of the same material. Northward, the
chalk may be followed as far as Yorkshire; on the south coast it appears
abruptly in the picturesque western bays of Dorset, and breaks into
the Needles of the Isle of Wight;[58] while on the shores of Kent it
supplies that long line of white cliffs to which England owes her name
of Albion.

Were the thin soil which covers it all washed away, a curved band
of white chalk, here broader, and there narrower, might be followed
diagonally across England from Lulworth in Dorset, to Flamborough Head
[59] in Yorkshire--a distance of over two hundred and eighty miles as
the crow flies.

From this band to the North Sea, on the east, and the Channel, on the
South, the chalk is largely hidden by other deposits; but, except in the
Weald [60] of Kent and Sussex, it enters into the very foundation of all
the south-eastern counties.

Attaining, as it does in some places, a thickness of more than a
thousand feet, the English chalk must be admitted to be a mass of
considerable magnitude. Nevertheless, it covers but an insignificant
portion of the whole area occupied by the chalk formation of the globe,
which has precisely the same general characters as ours, and is found
in detached patches, some less, and others more extensive, than the
English.

Chalk occurs in north-west Ireland; it stretches over a large part of
France,--the chalk which underlies Paris being, in fact, a continuation
of that of the London basin; it runs through Denmark and Central Europe,
and extends southward to North Africa; while eastward, it appears in the
Crimea and in Syria, and may be traced as far as the shores of the Sea
of Aral, in Central Asia.

If all the points at which true chalk occurs we