pen
air; and they cannot know--you do not know--what it is which prevents a
bird's living under water. So their guess is really a very fair one; no
more silly than that of the savages, who when they first saw the white
men's ships, with their huge sails, fancied they were enormous sea-birds;
and when they heard the cannons fire, said that the ships spoke in
thunder and lightning. Their guess was wrong, but not silly; for it was
the best guess they could make.

But I do know of one old woman who was silly. She was a boy's nurse, and
she gave the boy a thing which she said was one of the snakes which St.
Hilda turned into stone; and told him that they found plenty of them at
Whitby, where she was born, all coiled up; but what was very odd, their
heads had always been broken of. And when he took it, to his father, he
told him it was only a fossil shell--an Ammonite. And he went back and
laughed at his nurse, and teased her till she was quite angry.

Then he was very lucky that she did not box his ears, for that was what
he deserved. I dare say that, though his nurse had never heard of
Ammonites, she was a wise old dame enough, and knew a hundred things
which he did not know, and which were far more important than Ammonites,
even to him.

How?

Because if she had not known how to nurse him well, he would perhaps have
never grown up alive and strong. And if she had not known how to make
him obey and speak the truth, he might have grown up a naughty boy.

But was she not silly?

No. She only believed what the Whitby folk, I understand, have some of
them believed for many hundred years. And no one can be blamed for
thinking as his forefathers did, unless he has cause to know better.

Surely she might have known better?

How? What reason could she have to believe the Ammonite was a shell? It
is not the least like cockles, or whelks, or any shell she ever saw.

What reason either could she have to guess that Whitby cliff had once
been coral-mud, at the bottom of the sea? No more reason, my dear child,
than you would have to guess that this stone had been coral-mud likewise,
if I did not teach you so,--or rather, try to make you teach yourself so.

No. I say it again. If you wish to learn, I will only teach you on
condition that you do not laugh at, or despise, those good and honest and
able people who do not know or care about these things, because they have
other things to think of: like old John out th