"Ages and AEons since, thousands on thousands of years before there was a man to till the ground, I the little pebble was a living sponge, in the milky depths of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multiplied, till I became a tiny hive of wonders, each one of which would take you a life to understand. And then, I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell you you will never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud settled round us, I know not how, and covered us in; and for ages on ages I lay buried in the nether dark, and felt the glow of the nether fires, and was cracked and tossed by a hundred earthquakes. Again and again I have been part of an island, and then again sunk beneath the sea, to be upheaved again after long centuries, till I saw the light once more, and dropped from the face of some chalk cliff far away among high hills which have long since been swept off the face of the earth, and was tossed by currents till I became a pebble on the beach, while Reading was a sand-bank in a shallow sea. There I lay and rolled till I was rounded, for many a century more; till flood after flood past over me, and a new earth was made; and I was mixed up with fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills, and with freestones from the Gloucestershire wolds, and with quartz-boulders from the mountains of Wales, while over me swept the carcases of drowned elephants and bisons, and many a monstrous beast; and above me floated uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds, and the wrecks of a dying world. And then there came another age-- And it grew wondrous cold; And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald;