Page:An Old English Home and Its Dependencies.djvu/334

320 rubble and ripen their delicious fruit against the crumbled stone that radiates the warmth of the sun! In groping after fossils in the chalk quarries of the South Downs, delighted in being able to extract a fossil sponge or a glistening shark's tooth! Nothing so unsightly as a new quarry, a wound in the face of nature, yet nothing more picturesque than one which is old, all the scars healed over by nature. And then, again, what haunts old quarries are for rabbits—and therefore also places in which boys delight to spend hours ferreting Bunny.

In connexion with a quarry I will venture to tell a story—curious, because showing a form of superstition not extinct. I tell the tale my own way, but it is fundamentally true—that is to say, it is quite true that the quarryman told it; and believed himself to have been victimized in the way I relate, though I cannot vouch for the exact words he employed. I was examining for geological purposes a quarry in Cornwall that had been opened in the side of a hill for the extraction of stone,