One more used to monetary arrangements would have foreseen and averted this occurrence; but on the practical geologist the blow fell with stunning effect. He surrendered with deep regret his interest in the much-loved and really valuable little property near Bath, quitted London, and consented to have no home. From this time for seven years he became a wanderer in the north of England, rarely visiting London, except when drawn thither by the professional engagements which still, even in his loneliest retirements, were pressed upon him, and yielded him an irregular, contracted, and fluctuating income. In the winter of 1819-20, Mr. Smith, having perhaps more than usual leisure, undertook to walk from Lincolnshire into Oxfordshire. The object proposed was to pass along a particular line through the counties of Rutland, Northampton, Bedford, and Oxford, but the ultimate destination was Swindon, in Wiltshire. “Leaving the great road at Colsterworth, with some reflections on the birthplace of Newton,[5] we crossed in a day’s easy walk, the little county of Rutland, its hills of oolite and sand, its slopes of upper lias, and its valleys often showing marlstone, and reached the obscure village of Gretton, on the edge of Rockingham Forest. Whatever may now be the accommodations at this village, they were very wretched in 1819 (December), but the odd stories of supernatural beings and incredible frights which were narrated by the villagers assembled at the little inn, greatly amused Mr. Smith, and reminded him of exactly parallel tales which circulated around Whichwood Forest in his boyhood. “The next morning we walked to Kettering, noticing on the road the peculiar characters of the Northamptonshire oolite. In this walk Mr. Smith had somehow sprained or over-fatigued himself, and he chose to proceed to Wellingborough in a chaise. From this point, situated on sand of the oolite series, we resumed our geological proceedings on foot, and passing by Irchester, Woolaston, and Boziate, traversed in the next hills the oolite, the forest marble, the cornbrash, and an outlier of Kelloway’s rock. The road up Boziate Hill was mantled with fossiliferous stone, some of which, obtained from the hill-top, was believed to be Kelloway’s rock, and was found to contain _Ammonites sublævis_ and other fossils. A fine specimen of this ammonite was here laid by a particular tree on the road side, as it was large and inconvenient for the pocket, according to a custom often observed by Mr. Smith, whose memory for localities was so exact, that he has often, after many years, gone direct to some hoard of this nature, to recover his fossils. This road, however, over Boziate Hill, he was not to travel again.