snail

“Will you walk a little faster?” said a whiting to a snail.

“You can really have no notion how delightful it will be When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!” But the snail replied “Too far, too far!” and gave a look askance— Said he thanked the whiting kindly, but he would not join the dance.

The further off from England the nearer is to France— Then turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.

In the early 1800s, visitors to Lyme Regis, a small seaside town on the south coast of England, could buy an unusual souvenir from a table outside a carpenter's home: a stone snail, a curled shell or, with luck, a piece of bone far older than anyone could imagine.