VI.

THE SLATES ON THE ROOF.

HE slates on the roof should be, when

THE

rightly understood, a pleasant subject for contemplation to the dweller in a town. I do not ask him to imitate the boy who, cliffbred from his youth, used to spend stolen hours on the house-top, with his back against a chimney stalk, transfiguring in his imagination the roof-slopes into mountain-sides, the slates into sheets of rock, the cats into lions, and the sparrows into eagles. I only wish that he should-at least after reading this paper-let the slates on the roof carry him back in fancy to the mountains whence they came; perhaps to pleasant trips to the lakes

and hills of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and North Wales; and to recognise-as he will do if he have intellect as well as fancy-how beautiful and how curious an object is a common slate.

Beautiful: not only for the compactness and delicacy of its texture, and for the regularity and smoothness of its surface, but still more for its colour. Whether merely warm grey, as when dry, or bright purple, as when wet, the colour of the English slate well justifies Mr. Ruskin's saying, that wherever there is a brick wall and a slate roof, there need be no want of rich colour in an English landscape. But most beautiful is the hue of slate, when, shining wet in the sunshine after a summer shower, its blue is brought out in rich contrast by golden spots of circular lichen, whose spores, I presume, have travelled with it off its native mountains. Then,

indeed, it reminds the voyager of a sight which it almost rivals in brilliancy-of the sapphire of the deep ocean, brought out into blazing intensity by the contrast of the golden patches of floating gulf-weed beneath the tropic sun.

Beautiful, I say, is the slate; and curious likewise, nay, venerable; a most ancient and elaborate work of God, which has lasted long enough, and endured enough likewise, to bring out in it whatsoever latent capabilities of strength and usefulness might lie hid in it; which has literally been-as far as such words can apply to a thing inanimate

"Heated hot with burning fears,

And bathed in baths of hissing tears,

And battered by the strokes of doom

To shape and use."

And yet it was at first nought but an ugly

lump of soft and shapeless ooze.

Therefore, the slates to me are as a parable, on which I will not enlarge, but will leave each reader to interpret it for himself. I shall confine myself now to proofs that slate is hardened mud, and to hints as to how it assumed its present form.

That slate may have been once mud, is made probable by the simple fact that it can be turned into mud again. If you grind up slate, and then analyse it, you will find its mineral constituents to be exactly those of a fine, rich, and tenacious clay. The slate districts (at least in Snowdon) carry such a rich clay on them, wherever it is not masked by the ruins of other rocks. At Ilfracombe, in North Devon, the passage from slate below to clay above, may be clearly Wherever the top of the slate beds, and the soil upon it, is laid bare, the black layers of slate may be seen gradually melting

seen.

-if I may use the word-under the influence of rain and frost, into a rich tenacious clay, which is now not black, like its parent slate, but red, from the oxidation of the iron which it contains.

But, granting this, how did the first change take place?

It must be allowed, at starting, that time enough has elapsed, and events enough have happened, since our supposed mud began first to become slate, to allow of many and strange transformations. For these slates are found in the oldest beds of rocks, save one series, in the known world; and it is notorious that the older and lower the beds in which the slates are found, the better, that is, the more perfectly elaborate, is the slate. The best slates of Snowdon-I must confine myself to the district which I know personally-are found in the so-called "Cambrian "