very day that they may be enabled to toil!

The quarry in which I wrought lay on the southern side of a noble inland
bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a
thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the old red sandstone
of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay,
which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet,
and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an
open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments,
which had fallen from above blocked up the face of the quarry, and my
first employment was to clear them away. The friction of the shovel soon
blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe, and I
wrought hard and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below,
which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up
and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers, were applied by my brother
workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these
implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them. They
all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of
the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me,
and I deemed it a highly-amusing one: it had the merit, too, of being
attended with some such degree of danger as a boating or rock excursion,
and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few
capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction; and an immense
mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds,
that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die
in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a
pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid
with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it
had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of
the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish
yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed
to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and
thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green
summer haunts and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I
heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up,
and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir-wood beside us, and the
long dark sha