“What pleasure too to rest at the well-known cottage, the general termination of our walk, where old Simon the curiosity-monger picked up a mongrel sort of livelihood by selling fossils and petrifactions to one class of visitors, and cakes and fruit and cream to another. His scientific bargains were not without suspicion of a little cheatery, as my companion used laughingly to tell him ... but the fruit and curds were honest, as I can well avouch; and the legends of petrified sea-monsters, with which they were seasoned, bones of the mammoth, and skeletons of the sea-serpent have always been amongst the pleasantest of my seaside recollections.” Perhaps these “legends” had a tinge of prophecy in them, as it was only fifteen years later that Mary Anning, then a child of eleven years old, discovered in the rocks of Lyme Regis the gigantic fossil bones of the ichthyosaurus—a creature whose very jaw it seems exceeded six feet in length, and whose existence had hitherto been unknown. She also discovered later on the remains of the plesiosaurus.[1] [Footnote 1: The entire skeletons of these actual creatures are now to be seen in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.] Miss Anning kept a curiosity shop in a tiny house which is still to be seen facing the upper gates of the Great House. The King of Saxony, who visited Lyme in 1844, thus describes the place:— “We had alighted from the carriage,” he writes, “and were proceeding along on foot when we fell in with a shop in which the most remarkable petrifactions and fossil remains—the head of an ichthyosaurus, beautiful ammonites, etc.—were exhibited in the window. We entered and found a little shop and adjoining chamber completely filled with fossil productions of the coast.... I was anxious [before leaving] to write down the address of the place, and the woman who kept the shop with a firm hand wrote her name ‘Mary Anning’ in my pocket-book, and added as she returned the book into my hands: ‘I am well known throughout the whole of Europe.’” It is said that the King of Saxony paid a second visit to the fossil shop, when he invited Miss Anning to accompany him in his travelling coach and four to the scene of the great landslip at Pinny. On reaching a small farm-house on the hillside they quitted the coach to roam about the fallen rocks. On their return they found an old country woman seated in the stately vehicle. She explained, with some confusion, that she wanted to be able to boast hereafter that she had sat for once in her life in a royal coach! The kindly monarch assured her that he was in no way displeased, and he handed her out of the coach with courtly politeness.