Stippled ammonite shell in navy dots

The quarry men have stopped swearing at me now that I've shown them what I am after. Yesterday one of them, a big Welshman called Iorwerth who smells of wet slate, brought me a block the size of a loaf and split it with his hammer while I held my breath. Inside lay an ammonite as neat as a pocket watch, every chamber still ringed in grey, the coil tight as a fist. I nearly wept. You'd have laughed at me, sitting on an upturned crate with my hat in my lap like a mourner.

I have been drawing them all week in the back of the lodging house, using the stippling method you showed me last spring, pricking the paper with the nib until the shell comes up out of the dots. It is slow, and my wrist aches, but the dark crowding at the base of the spiral seems right to me, as though the oldest chambers have gathered their weight and settled. Then the rest of the shape goes thin, the dots loosening until they scatter off the page like spray off a wave. Mrs Pryce says it looks as if the thing is trying to leave the paper. I told her that was the idea.

When the cart comes Thursday I will send the block down to the museum in Bristol with a label in my best hand. If they refuse it, I shall keep it on the windowsill beside the candle, where the light gets in at dawn and catches the chambers.

Write back soon and tell me whether the tide was kind at Lyme.

Your loving brother, Edmund