Now if, seeing such pebbles about your town, you inquire, like a
sensible person who wishes to understand something of the spot on
which he lives, whence they come, you will be shown either a gravel-
pit or a clay-pit. In the gravel the pebbles and boulders lie mixed
with sand, as they do in the railway cutting just south of
Shrewsbury; or in huge mounds of fine sweet earth, as they do in the
gorge of the Tay about Dunkeld, and all the way up Strathmore, where
they form long grassy mounds--tomauns as they call them in some parts
of Scotland--askers as they call them in Ireland. These mounds, with
their sweet fresh turf rising out of heather and bog, were tenanted--
so Scottish children used to believe--by fairies. He that was lucky
might hear inside them fairy music, and, the jingling of the fairy
horses' trappings. But woe to him if he fell asleep upon the mound,
for he would be spirited away into fairyland for seven years, which
would seem to him but one day. A strange fancy; yet not so strange
as the actual truth as to what these mounds are, and how they came
into their places.

Or again, you might find that your town's pebbles and boulders came
out of a pit of clay, in which they were stuck, without any order or
bedding, like plums and raisins in a pudding. This clay goes usually
by the name of boulder-clay. You would see such near any town in
Cheshire and Lancashire; or along Leith shore, near Edinburgh; or, to
give one more instance out of hundreds, along the coast at
Scarborough. If you walk along the shore southward of that town, you
will see, in the gullies of the cliff, great beds of sticky clay,
stuffed full of bits of every rock between the Lake mountains and
Scarborough, from rounded pebbles of most ancient rock down to great
angular fragments of ironstone and coal. There, as elsewhere, the