10
LEPORES PALAEOLITHICI ; OR,
picked it up I saw it was the petrified head of a black and white bull terrier bitch.
Her eyes were both wide open and you could see all the veins in her skull. Some of
my mates said it was impossible for a bull terrier bitch to be turned into a stone,
leastways a flint, but I says, 'Here it is' ; they couldn't get over that. To
satisfy my mates, I went back to the road to look for the other limbs. I could
not find the legs, but I found part of the body and the tail. I've got the head on
my mantelpiece now, and I've been advised to take it to the Bethnal Green
Museum to get a scientific opinion about it, but I don't like to go much as my dress
is rough and they might think I was a Fenian."
Once, when visiting a pit at Homerton, I saw a carter run to his horse, and
suddenly take off its nosebag ; the man then laboriously brought the nosebag
towards me and littered out its contents on the ground : it was, of course, full of
flints. The man said the horse had carried the stones about for a month, and he
had placed the flints in the' nosebag for safety. There was a good implement
amongst the stones. When the man had been paid for the implement, he
addressed his horse and said, "Come along, Sarah." I thought this a curious
name for a gravel digger's horse.
An old digger at Bedford one said to me, "Ah, sir, don't trouble yourself any
more about trowels and flat irons"—the shape I had told him to look after—"I've
got a much better stone since I saw you last. It is a figure of a petrified Christian,
with two legs and two arms, both the shoulders raised up, and the head turned
round in astonishment."
When certain new roads were first made at Clapton, a ton or two of rotten
mussels from Billinsgate were thrown down as a substratum for the gravel. A
digger who had been instructed to look after fossil fresh-water mussels for me in
the sand said, "Ah, master, we have got a rare dose of mussels for you to-day."
Once, when I was raking over a gravel heap at Stamford Hill, two labourers
(both unknown to me) were sitting close by, when one said to the other, "Do you
see that gentleman, Jack?" "Yes," said the other. "Well," said the first,
"if you ever sees a heap of gravel anywhere, it don't matter where, if you keep
your eye on that heap of gravel long enough you will be bound to see that gent
come and walk about on the top of it."
A labourer at Thetford once wrote to me to say he had been told that I bought
"flitches" (meaning "flakes") and other fancy shapes, and would I buy a child's
foot and a Poll parrot's head and beak. He wrote a second time to say he had a
petrified piece of meat and a petrified plaice's head and two eyes. He also said
he had got a thunderbolt found by his little nephew directly after a thunderstorm,
whilst the bolt was still red-hot.
The following incident I take to be a very curious one. Whilst looking over
some newly-gravelled roads between Ealing Dean and Hanwell in 1881, an
extremely short and ruinous-looking old man made a rush at me and asked if I
was looking for curiosities. I said "Yes." The dwarfish old man then said he
had got "the greatest curiosity that was ever found in gravel—it was a petrified
duck's head, neck, beak, and two eyes." "Surely it must be a natural form," I
said, "a stone naturally taking the shape of a duck's head." "No," said the old
man, "I am as certain of the stone being a petrified duck's head as if I was there
whilst it was being petrified. Come to my house and see it ; many scientific
gentlemen have seen it, but none of them have understood it to be a duck's head
like I have." I said I could not go to the man's house, as I was too tired. "Is
it exactly like a duck's head ?" I said; "where did you find it?" "Where did