No sooner said than done. What a calming sensation a whiff of good tobacco induces on these burning days! But what have I got? Above thirty globes of chalcedony, blue and white, as oval as bantams’ eggs. I select half a dozen on account of some beauty or peculiarity, and fling the remainder into the sea, there to undergo a fresh impregnation. Next, sundry bits of the red and white conglomerate. Let me advise everybody who has the opportunity, to pick this up. When sliced and polished, the surface obtained beats the inlaid work of a cabinet-maker all to nothing. Next, a couple of choanites, one in the dark “rag,” ribbed like sea-weed; the other in pretty light-brown moss-agate. These two go into my breast-pocket for safety. Lastly, what has never been out of my hand since I found it—a huge, knotted jasper-agate, of five pounds’ weight.
I will only add that the beach here described is a first-rate one in its way, although not my absolute favourite. I had, however, never seen it before, and have never visited it since; moreover, I had not a hammer with me, nor any refreshment beyond a cigar, after tramping over many miles of deep shingle; consequently, I do not suppose I did justice to the contents of that bit of coast.
But where am I now? Two hundred miles away, and the scene is changed. I have just rounded a headland, on whose summit the ripening corn-field is waving and gleaming like the tuft on the head of a woodpecker. Dizzy precipices of chalk stand like sugar-loaves against the blue sky, here and there cleft in a tortuous, yawning chasm. Beneath, the beach seems to slumber, so gentle is that lisping murmur, where the long billowy swell washes the face of the skerries, and lifts up and down their heavy fringe of tangle like a giant’s beard. Two hours are mine, as we mortals reckon, before I am expected at the evening meal. This time I have my hammer with me—no clumsy carpenter’s tool, which might rend or splinter, but a tempered steel.
I did but walk a couple of miles in all. I found sundry pieces of perfectly white agate, one of which proved good enough for a seal. I broke open a score or two of jaspers, and was rewarded at last by a fine slab of the rich brown (quasi-Egyptian). Then I hunted up from the shingle a pocketful of “sponges,” and a choanite in dark purple flint, which is rare. And then time was up, and scaling the cliff by a well-known gap and pathway, I returned home to crab-pie and a cup of tea, and the welcome of a dear, kind face. This part of our coast is much visited now by pebble-seekers.
Now I have crossed a channel of the sea, and have looked upon the mighty three-deckers, and all the flower of the yachtery of England; and I have strolled through a smart modern town, and have passed a meditative half-hour in a very ancient village, and then, at a sharp turn, I have quitted the high-road, with its hot milestones, and picked my way through a blossoming lane where the nightingales were singing; and I have scrambled over the edge of a snipe-bog, and hurried past the mouth of a diluvian estuary, and here I am, stretched at full length on the choicest bit of beach in all the realm of Queen Victoria. In front of me are soaring pinnacles of chalk, ribbed and dotted with primeval flints, like the gun-muzzles in an upper deck. Behind me rises another barrier, formed of the dark “greensand;” and on one side, for the space of a mile, these lofty brows have dipped and disappeared, that the red edge of the wealden might crop out from a wide tract of rush-grown water-meadows. Through the heart of these latter steals a rivulet, beloved of stray wild-fowl, but not tenanted by anything so lively as a trout.
The position of this beach is all that can be desired, and its contents will not disappoint expectation. It has sometimes reminded me of one of those angular nooks formed externally by the converging hedges of a cover and a crop, where you are sure to meet with the hares and pheasants which have come out to feed on your wheat-stubble or turnips. Here, however, instead of the scuttling game, you must look for matchless pebbles.
Often as I have paced this charming strand, the occasion of my first stepping upon it was pure accident, as, indeed, are some of the pleasantest turns in life. I remember one summer’s day, when the solid cliffs seemed to be pulverizing under the heat, and the air-vessels in exposed sheaves of bladderwrack were splitting and popping like crackers, I found four or five specimens within a couple of hundred yards which I have never since surpassed, seldom equalled. Two of these were deep red choanites, conveying the idea, not of dull “oxide,” but that the animal’s blood had suffused the agate; another was a particoloured madrepore, another, a moss-jasper.
This bay, however, possesses peculiar advantages. In addition to the fossils which drop from time to time out of its own overhanging cliffs, it is fed in a remarkable manner from other sources.
Until of late years, Sussex has been the usual resort of those who desired to collect pebbles for the cabinet. The capabilities of this coast vary with every twenty miles. The Brighton beach was once famous for the supply of “landscape-pebbles;” but in the lapse of years its fecundity has been sadly impaired. The best chance remaining now is that of an occasional waif during the March winds on the sweep fronting Brunswick Terrace, and for about half a mile toward Shoreham.
Bognor has long reefs of rock at low water, and, by the usual rule, it ought to yield petrified sponges; for I think that, generally speaking, the locality determines the animal. But the infirmity of the Bognor shore is, that its pebbles are chafed and worn to skeletons by the furious storms which assail this unprotected coast in winter. No fossil with a delicate constitution can long withstand the effect of these gales and plunging seas.