Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

in which the old savages lived,-how they were made, and

t in good time: but now-What

some ch

things in the eyes of wise and reasonable people. Whenever I hear young men saying "only" this and "only" that, I begin to suspect them of belonging, not to the noble army of sages-much less to the most noble army of martyrs,-but to the ignoble army of noodles, who think nothing interesting or important but dinners, and balls, and races, and back-biting their neighbours; and I should be sorry to see you enlisting in that regiment when you grow up. But think-are not chalk-carts very odd and curious things? I think they are. To my m

(for I suspect you cannot answer it)-Why does the farmer take the trouble to sen

urse. They are chalking the bit at the top o

, or ought to know it. Recollect the chalk cuttings and banks on the railway between Basingstoke and Winchester-how utterly barren they are. Th

the caves are not; and "Learn from the thing that lies nearest you" is as good a rule as "Do the duty

e is a little boy who wants to know wh

m round here, he will have to learn f

t

will have all gone out of it; and it will turn to a nice wholesome brown, like the rest of the field; and then you will know that the land is sweet, and fit for any crop. Now do you mind what I tell you, and then I'll tell you something more. We put on the chalk because, beside sweetening the land, it will hold water. You see, the lan

of chalk hold water? The

ill. Just take up that lump, young squire, and you'll see water eno

the lump is all

in the chalk in strings, as you may see it if you break the ice across. Now you may judge for yourself how much wat

rue that the

rs, perhaps for a thousand years and more, have been farming this country, reading Madam How's books with very keen eyes, experimenting and watching, very carefully and rationally; making mistakes often, and failing

ts are not yet agreed how it happens. But he was right; and right, too, what he told you about the water inside th

r: because Madam How has put under them her great chalk sponge. The winter rains soak into it; and the summer heat draws that ra

old city below, with the long cathedral roof, and the tower of St. Cross, and the gray old walls and buildings shrouded by noble trees, all embosomed among the soft rounded lines of the chalk-hills; and then you begin to feel very thirsty, and cry

ater, eve

drop t

rout in water so crystal-clear that you see every weed and pebble as if you looked through air. If ever there was pure water, you think, that is pure. Is it so? Drink some. Wash

and night, year after year, the chalk goes down to the sea; and if there were such creatures as water-fairies-if it were true, as the old Greeks and Romans thought, that rive

g but, as your sister says when she

r over st

sharps a

into eddy

on the

men who have eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discer

bout, and

a blosso

d there a l

nd there a

and there a

e, as

a silvery

e golden

them all al

he brimmi

y come and

o on fo

w. So day by day, and night by night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry, delicate and soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear: and yet I am never tired. Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me. Every root and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford downs

ing down the hill, and then of the graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see

or like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees, and Undine, a

e ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny before it. That may happen to it, which has happened already to many a grain of lime. It may be carried thousands of miles away to help in building up a coral

ably a far better one. For, as I told you at first, Lady Why's intentions are far wiser and better than our fa

e followed the chalk-cart a long

Forty Thieves-but some word or two which Madam Why will teach us, and forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk in, and behold rivers a

u know that when I joke I am usually

are no cav

ofitable for us Southern folk who live on it. I am afraid that-what between squeezing and heating-she would flatten us all out into phosphatic fossils, about an inch thick; and turn Winchester city into a "breccia" which would puzzle geologists a hundred

w, would run over the ground down-hill, and if it came to a crack (a fault, as it is called) it would run down between the rock; and as it ran it would eat that hole wider and wider year by year, and make a swallow-

below; and beside that, lions and bears and hy?nas might live in the caves below, as we know they did in some caves, and drag in bones through the caves' mouths; or, again, savages might live in that cave, and bring in animals to eat, like the wild beasts; and so those bones might be mixed up, as we know they were, with things which the savages had left behind-like flint tools or beads; and then the whole would be hardened, by the dripping of the limestone water, into a paste

wallow-hole sure

p making a cave for i

alactites (those tell me who have seen them) are among the most beautiful of all Madam How's work; sometimes like branches of roses or of grapes; sometimes like statues; sometimes like delicate curtains, and I know not what other beautiful shapes. I have never seen them, I am sorry to say, and therefore I cannot describe them. But they are all made in the same way; just in the same way as those little straight stalactites which you may have seen hanging, like icicles, in vaulted cellars, or under the arches of a bridge. The water melts more lime than it can carry, and drops some of it again, making fresh limestone grain by grain as it drips from the roof above; and fresh limestone again where it splashes on the floor below: till if it dripped long enough, the stalactite hanging from above would meet the stalagmite rising from below, and join in one straight round white graceful shaft, which would seem (but only se

lives that strange beast, the Proteus a sort of long newt which never comes to perfection-I suppose for want of the genial sunlight which makes all things grow. But he is blind; and more, he keeps all his life the same feathery gills which newts have when they are babies, and which we have so often looked at through the microscope, to see the blood-globules run round and round inside. You would not wonder, either, at the Czirknitz Lake, near the same place, which at certain times of the year vanishes suddenly through chasms under water, sucking the fish down with it; and after a certain time boils suddenly up again from the depths, bringing back wi

gallery have been explored already, and yet no end found to the cave. In it (the guides will tell you) there are "226 avenues, 47 domes, 8 cataracts, 23 pits, and several rivers;" and if that fact is not very interesting to you (as it certainly is not to me) I will tell you something which oug

ay see them in any crab) still left; but the eyes which should be on the top of them are gone. There are blind fish, too, in the ca

scades, and halls, no man yet knows how far. A friend of mine last year went in farther, I believe, than any one yet has gone; but, instead of taking Indian torches made of bark and resin, or even torches made of Spanish wax, such as a brave bishop of those parts used once when he went in farther than any one before him, he took with him some of that beautiful magnesium light which you have seen often here at home. And in one place, when he lighted up the magnesium, he found himself in a hall full 300 feet high-higher far, that is, than the dome of St. Paul's-and a very solemn thought it was to him, he said, that he had seen what no other human being ever had seen; and that no ray of light had ever struck on that stupendous roof in all the ages since the making of the world. Bu

were true. They are great birds, more than three feet across the wings, somewhat like owls, somewhat like cuckoos, somewhat like goatsuckers; but, on the whole, unlike anything in the world but themselves; and instead of feeding on moths or mice, they feed upon hard dry fruits, which they pick off the trees after the set of su

ldren need not learn them yet; and they can never learn them, unless they master her alphab

tone, and have forgotten to settle what they are, and how they were made. We must think of that next time. It will not do for us