Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me.
Every root and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford downs;--ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land--foul enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these, giving off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a tiny grain of chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid hill by one of the million pores and veins which at once feed and burden my springs.

Ages on ages I have worked on thus, carrying the chalk into the sea.

And ages on ages, it may be, I shall work on yet; till I have done my work at last, and levelled the high downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of flint gravel rattling in the shallow waves.
She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would surely think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and then of the graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as vast and wonderful, Madam How's work is than that of man.
But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could not tell you.

For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees, and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would have no soul; no reason; no power to say why.
It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at least listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps--I can only say perhaps--that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a nobler destiny before it.

That may happen to it, which has happened already to many a grain of lime.