'Found?' said Jones, joyfully. 'I am glad! I will never sleep at my post again! Don't you let out a word of this, constable,' he said anxiously.
'Not I,' said the policeman, firmly; and he kept his word, for he did not wish his joke to get to the inspector's ears.
A TURKEY'S COSTLY DIET.
At a dinner given by a wealthy Washington lady, it is said, a turkey, fattened on pearls valued at over two hundred guineas, was served. Some little time before, the hostess lost a valuable brooch and a pair of earrings set with pearls. After a long search, the missing articles were found in the garden, but the pearls had been plucked out. She was convinced that a pet turkey was the culprit, and the bird was killed, but no trace of the gems was found. A chemist, who made an examination, declared that the pearls had been dissolved almost immediately after they had been swallowed. To commemorate the loss a dinner was arranged, and each guest received a photograph of the famous turkey.
THE STORY OF ROCK-SALT.
Salt under ground! It seems a strange thing, at first, to find salt amongst the rocks, deep down in the earth. What does rock-salt tell us? It reveals to us a place where once a sea existed; the water has since flowed away, leaving some salt behind. We know that ordinary salt exposed to the air soon gets damp, and then becomes quite fluid, but rock-salt away from air and sun keeps firm for ages. Rock-salt is found in various layers of the earth's crust. Some of the spaces of underground water are called 'seas,' but in fact, large as they were, they often did not resemble the 'seas' we have now, because they were much shallower. A few were fairly deep, however. Then, again, these ancient seas were sometimes so salt that no animal could live in them, and only a few plants. Such seas, in fact, were mostly 'dead,' and this accounts for the masses of salt deposited along their bottoms. But we find also signs of rough water in the numerous pebbles of the layer where the salt is found amongst hard red gravel and brown quartz.
Germany once had a tolerably deep sea, not very salt, and the bottom surface of it shows coral reefs. There are signs in it of great fishes armed with strong teeth, enabling them to crush the shell-fish upon which they fed. These swarmed below the sea in thousands. North England and the Midlands have the Kemper beds, where the 'seas' were always shallow, and where we can trace the marks of rain-drop filterings and sun-cracks. The rock-salt is often in a layer one hundred feet thick. It is supposed that one part of these seas was separated from another part by a bar of sand, over which the waves toppled only now and then. In the cut-off sea, evaporation went on through the ages, and of course a deposit of salt was formed, while the occasional overflow from outside replaced the water which had evaporated. But really this is not known for certain. It is only clear rock-salt contains the minerals we find in our present sea-water, bromine, iodine, and magnesia.
Generally, this salt is not mixed with fragments of a different substance, but is in columns of rough crystals. Now and then there is found a layer of rock-salt, with one of marl and shells under it, succeeded by rock-salt again, showing that for a time a change had taken place.