I found, however, one of the earliest dreams of my youth curiously mingling with my restorations, or rather forming their groundwork. I had read Gulliver at the proper age; and my imagination had become filled with the little men and women, and retained strong hold of at least one scene laid in the country of the very tall men--that in which the traveller, after wandering amid grass that rose twenty feet over his head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my apron-breadth of a garden; and, coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the vignette-like scenes by which I was surrounded would have appeared to creatures so minute. I have imagined them threading their way through dark forests of bracken forty feet high--or admiring on the hill-side some enormous club-moss that stretched out its green hairy arms for whole roods--or arrested at the edge of some dangerous morass, by hedges of gigantic horse-tail, that bore a-top, high over the bog, their many-windowed, club-like cones, and at every point shot forth their green verticillate leaves, huge as coach-wheels divested of the rim. And while I thus dreamed for my Liliputian companions, I became for the time a Liliputian myself, examined the minute in Nature as if through a magnifying-glass, roamed in fancy under ferns that had shot up into trees, and saw the dark club-like heads of the equisetaceæ stand up over the spiky branches, some six yards or so above head. And now, strange to tell, I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile imaginings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of the forests of the Coal Measures, by learning to look at our ferns, club-mosses, and equisetaceæ, with the eye of some wandering traveller of Liliput lost amid their entanglements. When sauntering at sunset along the edge of a wood-embosomed stream that ran through the grounds, and beside which the horse-tail rose thick and rank in the danker hollows, and the bracken shot out its fronds from the drier banks, I had to sink in fancy as of old into a manikin of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in the tangled grasses and thickly-interlaced equisetaceæ, and tall trees in the brake and the lady-fern. But many a wanting feature had to be supplied, and many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arboraceous ferns, and of horse-tails tall as the masts of pinnaces, there stood up gigantic club-mosses, thicker than the body of a man, and from sixty to eighty feet in height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the existing forms--sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of