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;

and as the icebergs melted in the sun, the stones and the silt fell out of them, and covered me up; and I was in darkness once more, vexed by many an earthquake, till I became part of this brave English land.  And now I am a pebble here in Reading street, to be ground beneath the wheels of busy men:  and yet you cannot kill me, or hinder my fulfilling the law which cannot be broken.  This year I am a pebble in the street; and next year I shall be dust upon the fields above; and the year after that I shall be alive again, and rise from the ground as fair green wheat-stems, bearing up food for the use of man.  And even after that you cannot kill me.  The trampled and sodden straw will rot only to enter into a new life; and I shall pass through a fresh cycle of strange adventures, age after age, till time shall be no more; doing my work in my generation, and fulfilling to the last the will of God, as faithfully as when I was the water-breathing sponge in the abysses of the old chalk sea.”  All this and more, gentlemen and ladies, the pebble could tell to you, and will:  but he is old and venerable, and like old men, he wishes to be approached with respect, and does not like to be questioned too much or too rapidly; so that you must not be offended if you meet with more than one rebuff from him; or if he keeps stubborn silence, till he has seen that you are a modest and attentive person, to whom it is worth while to open a little of his forty or fifty thousand years’ experience.

Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the imagination.  Not merely in such objects as the pebble, whose history I have so hastily, but I must add faithfully, sketched; but in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool, will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land.  And I beg my elder hearers not to look on this as light praise.  Imagination is a valuable thing; and even if it were not, it is a thing, a real thing, a faculty which every one has, and with which you must do something.  You cannot ignore it; it will assert its own existence.  You will be wise not to neglect it in young children; for if you do not provide wholesome food for it, it