Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

no bigger than my hand, which lies upon the shelf; why I ponder ove

ken wise men many a year to decipher. I could not decipher that letter when first I saw the stone. More shame for me, for I had seen it often before,

nd really has been, broken off by a hammer. But when you look again, you see there

bbed part, and tell

place would have been flat: but if you put your fingers over it, you will find that it is not flat. It is rolled, fluted, channelled, so that the thing or things which rubbed it

his fingers, and worked the small scratches with that. But this stone came from a place where man had, perhaps, never stood before,-ay, which, perhaps, had never seen the light of day bef

strong and yet gentle, tough and yet yielding, like the hand of a man; a hand which handles and uses in a grip stronger than a gia

to me, who never saw a glacier myself, to show me how the marks which the ice makes in Switzerland are exactly the same as those which the ice has made in Snowdon and in the Highlands, and many another place where I have traced them, and written a little, too, about them in years gone by. And so I treasure this, as a sign that Madam How's ways do not change nor

ed up on high, like those in the pictures of Arctic voyages which you are so fond of looking through. You cannot recollect how that winter even in our little Blackwater Brook the alder stems were all peeled white, and scarred, as if they had been gnawed by hares and deer, simply by the rushing and scraping of the ice,-a sight which gave me again a little picture of the destruction which the ice makes of quays, and stages, and houses along the shore upon the coasts of North America, when suddenly setting in with wind and tide, it jams and piles up high inland, as you may read for yourself some day in a delightful book called Frost and Fire. You recollect none of these things. Ice and snow are to you mere playthings; and you long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make your stomach ache. And I dare say you have said, like many another boy, on a bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it would be always winter!" You little knew for what you asked. You little thought what the earth would soon be like, if it were always winter,-if one sheet of ice on the pond glued itself on to the bottom o

or has come down all the valleys of Greenland and Spitzbergen till they reach the sea, and there end as cliffs of ice, from which great icebergs snap off continually, and fall and float away, wandering southward into the Atlantic for many a hundred miles. You have seen draw

ray mountain sides. And it would be an impertinence-that means a meddling with things which I have no business-to picture to you glaciers which have been pictured so well and often by gentlemen wh

ternal snow-field which stretches for miles and miles along the mountain tops, fed continually by fresh snow-storms falling from the sky. That snow slides off into the valleys hour by hour, and as it rushes down is ground and pounded, and thawed and frozen again into a sticky paste of ice, which flows slowly but surely till it reaches the warm valley at the mountain foot, and there melts bit by bit. The long black lines which

ow uses her great ice-plough to plough down her old mountains, and spread the stuff of them about the valleys to make rich straths of fertile soil. Nay, so immensely strong, because immensely heavy, is the share of this her great ice-plough, that some will tell you (and it is not for me to say that they are wrong) that with it she has ploughed out all the mountain la

it will tell him presently how to find the marks of them far and wide over his native land. But as you, my child, care most about this country in which

top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as the sands at Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does not. See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits, filled up with gravel. And see, too, how over

ley Hill; and, best of all, in the railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where upon the top the white sand and gravel is arranged in red and brown waves, and fes

did ice

y have brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this ploughshare of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is continually being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place where the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the ice. So, what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the mud, and the dirt which it leaves behind when it melts, the stones, and sand, and mud upon the shore are jumbled up into curious curved and twisted layers, exactly like those which Mr. Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits. And when I first read abou

little fact, and know what it really means, it makes you certain that a thousand other great facts have happened. You may be astonished: but you cannot deny your own eyes, and your own common sense. You feel like Robinson Crusoe when, walking along the shore of his desert island, he saw for the first time the print of a man's foot in the sand. How it could have got there without a miracle he could not dr

ology which there is no mistaking; and th

waited. As the men dug on, they dug up a great many large flints, with bottle-green coats. "Now," I said, "I am sure. For I know where these flints must have come from." And for reasons which would be too long to tell you here, I said, "Some time or other, icebergs have been floating northward from the Hog's Back over Aldersho

ies into which the sun never shines, and round to the dark fir forests of the Ballochbuie. That is the arc of the bow; and the cord of the bow is the silver Dee, more than a thousand feet below you; and in the centre of the cord, where the arrow would be fitted in, stands Balmoral, with its Castle, and its Gardens, and its Park, and pleasant cottages and homesteads all around. And when you have looked at the beautiful amphitheatre of forest at your feet, and looked too at the great mountains to the westward, and Benaun, and Benna-buird and Benna-muicdhui, with their bright patches of eternal snow, I should advise you to look at the rock on which you stand, and see what you see there. And you will see that on the side of the Coiles towards Lochnagar, and between the knolls of them,

low, you will have a fair right to say, as I said, "The seeds of these plants were brought by the ice ages and ages since from off

xifrages, and such like-desolation and cold and lifeless everywhere. That ice-time went on for ages and for ages; and yet it did not go on in vain. Through it Madam How was ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich farms which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into Sutherlandshire. I could show you everywhere the green banks and knolls of earth, which Scotch people call "kames" and "tomans"-perhaps brought down by ancient glaciers, or dropped by ancient icebergs-now so smooth and green through summer and through winter, among the wild heath and the rough p

t because they are not strange and wonderful enough: for more wonderful sure than any fairy

ld age of ice? That is a long story, and a