"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."

The pickaxe, in the sinewy arms of its owner, soon dislodged great cakes
of the upper deposit and laid bare a stratum of olive-green clay, which