and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford downs;—­ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land—­foul enough then, but pure enough before it touches me—­each of these, giving off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a tiny grain of chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid hill by one of the million pores and veins which at once feed and burden my springs.  Ages on ages I have worked on thus, carrying the chalk into the sea.  And ages on ages, it may be, I shall work on yet; till I have done my work at last, and levelled the high downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of flint gravel rattling in the shallow waves.

She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would surely think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and then of the graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as vast and wonderful, Madam How’s work is than that of man.

But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could not tell you.  For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees, and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would have no soul; no reason; no power to say why.

It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why:  or at least listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps—­I can only say perhaps—­that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered world than this:  or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny before it.  That may happen to it, which has happened already to many a grain of lime.  It may be carried thousands of miles away to help in building up a coral reef (what that is I must tell you afterwards).  That coral reef may harden into limestone beds.  Those beds may be covered up, pressed, and, it may be, heated, till they crystallise into white marble:  and out of it fairer statues be carved, and grander temples built, than the world has ever yet seen.

And if that is not the reason why the chalk is being sent into the sea, then there is another reason, and probably a far better one.  For, as I told you at first, Lady Why’s intentions are far wiser and better than our fancies; and she—­like Him whom she obeys—­is able to do exceeding abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or think.

But you will say now that we have followed the chalk-cart a long way, without coming to the cave.

You are wrong.  We have come to the very mouth of the cave.  All we have to do is to say—­not “Open Sesame,” like Ali Baba in the tale of the Forty Thieves—­but some word or two which Madam Why will teach us, and forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk in, and behold rivers and cascades underground, stalactite pillars and stalagmite statues, and all the wonders of the grottoes of Adelsberg, Antiparos, or Kentucky.