bylon of
old, it reminds one of the suburbs of some ancient city lying embosomed,
with all its dwellings and fields, within some roomy crescent of the
city wall. We passed, ere we entered on the level, a steep-sided narrow
dell, through which a small stream finds its way from the higher
grounds, and which terminates at the upper end in an abrupt precipice,
and a lofty but very slim cascade. "One of the few superstitions that
still linger on the island," said my friend the minister, "is associated
with that wild hollow. It is believed that shortly before a death takes
place among the inhabitants, a tall withered female may be seen in the
twilight, just yonder where the rocks open, washing a shroud in the
stream. John, there, will perhaps tell you how she was spoken to on one
occasion, by an over-bold, over-inquisitive islander, curious to know
whose shroud she was preparing; and how she more than satisfied his
curiosity, by telling him it was his own. It is a not uninteresting
fact," added the minister, "that my poor people, since they have become
more earnest about their religion, think very little about ghosts and
spectres: their faith in the realities of the unseen world seems to have
banished from their minds much of their old belief in its phantoms."

In the rude fences that separate from each other the little farms in
this plain, we find frequent fragments of the oyster bed, hardened into
a tolerably compact limestone. It is seen to most advantage, however, in
some of the deeper cuttings in the fields, where the surrounding matrix
exists merely as an incoherent shale; and the shells may be picked out
as entire as when they lay, ages before, in the mud, which we still see
retaining around them its original color. They are small, thin,
triangular, much resembling in form some specimens of the _Ostrea
deltoidea_, but greatly less in size. The nearest resembling shell in
Sowerby is the _Ostrea acuminata_,--an oyster of the clay that underlies
the great Oolite of Bath. Few of the shells exceed an inch and a half in
length, and the majority fall short of an inch. What they lack in bulk,
however, they make up in number. They are massed as thickly together, to
the depth of several feet, as shells on the heap at the door of a
Newhaven fisherman, and extend over many acres. Where they lie open we
can still detect the triangular disc of the hinge, with the single
impression of the abductor muscle; and the foliaceous character