“‘What is that white line on the flint, Bob?’--‘Chalk, father,’ with surprise at my dulness; and then the unfolding of the tale of wonder--thousands of lovely infinitely small shells in that scrawl of chalk; each had, ages and ages ago, its little inmate, and so on. Wide eyes and open mouths, until sceptical Dick--‘Well, but, father, how did they get here? How could they crawl or swim to the dry land when they were dead?’ More wonders, and a snub for that small boy. ‘Why, this hillside we are sitting on is a bit of that old sea-bottom!’ And still the marvel grew, until, trust me, there is not a feature of the chalk that is not written down in _le journal intime_ of each child’s soul. They know the soft roll of the hills, the smooth dip of the valleys, the delights of travellers’ joy, queer old yews, and black-berrying in the sudden ‘bottoms’ of the chalk. The endless singing of a solitary lark--nothing but larks--the trailing of cloud-shadows over the hills, the blue skies of Sussex, blue as those of Naples--these things are theirs to have and to hold, and are all associated with the chalk; they have the sense of the earth-mother, of the connection of things, which makes for poetry. “Then their mother has rather a happy way of getting pictures printed on the ‘sensitive plate’ of each. She hits on a view, of narrow range generally, and makes the children look at it well and then describe it with closed eyes. One never-to-be forgotten view was seized in this way. ‘First grass, the hill-slopes below us, with sheep feeding about: and then a great field of red poppies--there’s corn, but we can’t see it; then fields and fields of corn, quite yellow and ripe, reaching out a long way; next, the sea, very blue, and three rather little boats with white sails; a lark a long way up in the sky singing as loud as a band of music; and _such_ a shining sun!’ No doubt our little maid will have all that to her dying day; and isn’t it a picture worth having?” “Mr. Morris’s hint admits of endless expansion; why, you could cover the surface formations of England in the course of the summer holidays of a boy’s schooldays, and thus give him a key to the landscape, fauna, and flora of much of the earth’s surface. It’s admirable.”