A short time after the arrival of our travellers, their hostess inquired if they had yet found any fossils.  Mysie frankly confessed that they did not know there were any to find, which was evidently as great a surprise to Mrs. F. as their ignorance of the Fresnel light had been to her husband.  She at once offered the services of her daughter Clarissa as guide and assistant, and gave glowing accounts of the treasures to be found.  The offer was gladly accepted; and Clarissa, a merry little romp, about twelve years old, soon made her appearance, armed with a pickaxe, hoe, and basket.

Thus laden, and in the teeth of a shrewd northeast wind, the little barefooted pioneer led the way directly over the brow of a cliff, which, had Mysie been alone, she would have pronounced entirely impracticable.  Now, however, fired with a lofty emulation, she silently followed her guide, grasping, however, at every shrub and protection with somewhat convulsive energy.

“Here’s a good place,” announced Clarissa, pausing where a shelf of gravelly rock afforded tolerable foothold.  “Professor Hitchcock told father that in here were strata of the tertiary formation, and there’s where we get the fossils.”

“But how do you come at the tertiary formation through all this sand and gravel?” asked Mysie, aghast at the prospect.

“Oh, dig; that’s why I brought the pick and hoe; we must dig a hole about a foot deep, and then we shall come to the stuff that has the fossils in it.  You may have the hoe, and I’ll take the pick, ’cause that’s the hardest.”

“Then let me have it; I am stronger than you,” exclaimed Mysie, suddenly roused to enthusiasm at the idea of “picking” her way into the tertiary formation of the earth, and exhuming its fossilized remains.

Seizing the pickaxe, she aimed a mighty blow at the clay and gravel conglomerate before her; but the instrument, falling wide of its intended mark, struck upon a rock, and sent such a jarring thrill up both her arms and such a tingle to her fingers’ ends as suddenly quenched her antiquarian zeal, and reminded her of a frightful account she once read of a convent of nuns captured by some brutal potentate, who forced them to mend his highways by breaking stones upon them with very heavy hammers; and the historian mentioned, as a common occurrence, that, when any sister dislocated her shoulder, one of her comrades would set it, and the sufferer would then resume her labors.

Mysie, having this warning before her eyes, and being doubtful of Clarissa’s surgical abilities, concluded to postpone her researches, and proposed to her companion to fill the basket with shells and pebbles from the beach, to which cowardly proposition Clarissa yielded but a reluctant consent.

The next day, however, Mr. F. and Caleb, learning the result of the fossil-search, offered to apply their more efficient skill and strength to a new attempt in the same direction; and, with high hopes for the result, Mysie, still accompanied by Clarissa, proceeded to another portion of the cliffs, where a low, wedge-shaped promontory, shadowed by beetling crags, was, as Mr. F. confidently stated, “sure for teeth.”