It was not an unusual incident that a lawn gate should have been carelessly left open, and, the gate being open, it was not surprising that a stray cow should turn in thither to feast on blue grass. Given the open gate and the intruding cow, it was in the usual order of affairs that Scroggins, our black boy, should arrive upon the scene, gesticulating and loudly remonstrant. Scroggins seized a large lump of hard clay and flung it at our neighbor’s Alderney, by way of emphasizing his objurgations. The cow was already hastening her departure, and the lumps of clay struck not the retreating cow, but the granite horse-block, and so fell to pieces. At that instant I came by, and oh, joy! as the coarse matrix of clay crumbled, there fell out of it the most perfect crinoid, or stone lily, I had ever seen. White and clean, its sharp ridges, or folds, perfect, an inch of stem in good preservation--“Scroggins! Tell me quickly, where you found the clay which you have brought to level up that hollow in the lawn?” “I done fotch him from Hopkins’ quarry, missey. A clay bank jest clost along side dat quarry, suah.” [Illustration: THE STONE LILIES.] Verily then there are fossil crinoids to be found in that quarry; therefore let us take a hammer, and some one strong-armed to wield it, and away to Hopkins’ quarry. The rock of Hopkins’ quarry is of the lower Silurian. Here and there we search among the fragments torn out by blasting, and lo, plenty of portions of crinoids. The crinoid found in the clay had evidently been broken from the rock in some blast, and had been flung over into the soft clay of the bank, which had hardened about it. At last we carefully chisel from the rock a stem a foot long, and another fair, cup-shaped, fluted stone lily. As the rock is cut away we indulge in some meditations on this beautiful form of ancient life, the animal water-lilies of the olden time. They came first in the lower Silurian, when coral was king, and in their enormous numbers they soon divided the empire of the sea with the busy polyps. Moored to the sea-bottom, waving on their long flexible stems, as fleets of pond-lilies now ride at anchor, stretching out their plume-like arms, more like flowers than animals, grew the Silurian crinoids. A few of them now remain in the deep seas, but with these few exceptions the crinoid has vanished from the living world, but has left its representative descendants in the great order to which the star-fish, sea-urchins, and sea-cucumbers belong.[36]