that a very exquisite pleasure may be
a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure
enough to enjoy it.

The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior strata,
and our first employment, on resuming our labours, was to raise it from
its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was
much struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested.
The entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that
had been left by the tide an hour before. I could trace every bend and
curvature, every cross-hollow and counter-ridge of the corresponding
phenomena; for the resemblance was no half-resemblance--it was the
thing itself; and I had observed it a hundred and a hundred times when
sailing my little schooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had
become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or of what
element had they been composed? I felt as completely at fault as
Robinson Crusoe did on his discovering the print of the man's foot on
the sand. The evening furnished me with still further cause of wonder.
We raised another block in a different part of the quarry, and found
that the area of a circular depression in the stratum below was broken
and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool,
recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening. Several
large stones came rolling down from the diluvium in the course of the
afternoon. They were of different qualities from the sandstone below,
and from one another; and, what was more wonderful still, they were all
rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed about in the sea, or
the bed of a river, for hundreds of years. There could not, surely, be
a more conclusive proof that the bank which had enclosed them so long
could not have been created on the rock on which it rested. No workman
ever manufactures a half-worn article, and the stones were all
half-worn! And if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath? I
was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough for thought that
evening, without once thinking of the unhappiness of a life of labour.

HUGH MILLER.

* * * * *

THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS.

A good ornithologist should be able to distinguish birds by their air,
as well as by their colours and shape, on the ground as well as on the
wing, and in the bush as well