'You drank of the well, I warrant, betimes,'
He to the Cornishman said;
But the Cornishman smiled as the stranger spake,
And sheepishly shook his head.

'I hastened as soon as the wedding was done,
And left my wife in the porch;
But, i' faith, she had been wiser than me,
For she took a bottle to church.'

And with all their extravagances of expression and questionable taste,
the numerous stories which Southey delighted to versify on themes
demoniac and diabolical, from the _Devil's Walk_ to the _True Ballad
of St Antidius_, are fraught with farcical import, and have an
individual ludicrousness all their own. That he could succeed
tolerably in the mock-heroic vein, may be seen in his parody on
Pindar's _ariston men hydor_, entitled _Gooseberry Pie_, and in some
of the occasional pieces called _Nondescripts_. Nor do we know any one
of superior ingenuity in that overwhelming profusion of epithets and
crowded creation of rhymes, which so tickle the ear and the fancy in
some of his verses, and of which we have specimens almost unrivalled
in the celebrated description of the cataract of Lodore, and the
vivaciously ridiculous chronicle of Napoleon's march to Moscow.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Southey was no purist in his phraseology at times. The not very
refined monosyllable in the text may, however, be tolerated as having
a technical relation to the fiddle-strings by hypothesis.

[3] This patrician Bawdrons is not forgotten in Southey's verse;
thus--

Our good old cat, Earl Tomlemagne,
Is sometimes seen to play,
Even like a kitten at its sport,
Upon a warm spring-day.

TRACKS OF ANCIENT ANIMALS IN SANDSTONE.

Many of our readers must have heard of the interest excited a few
years ago by the discovery, that certain marks on the surface of slabs
of sandstone, raised from a quarry in Dumfriesshire, were the
memorials of extinct races of animals. The amiable and intelligent Dr
Duncan, minister of Ruthwell, who had conferred on society the
blessing of savings-banks for the industrious poor, was the first to
describe to the world these singular chronicles of ancient life. The
subject was afterwards brought forward in a more popular style by Dr
Buckland, in his lively book, the Bridgewater Treatise on Geology.
Since then, examples of similar markings have been found in several
other parts of Europe, and a still greater number in America.

Dumfriesshire is st