d think
again for some tool of Madam How's which may have made them.

And now I think you must give up guessing, and I must tell you the answer
to the riddle. Those marks were made by a hand which is 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 giant's its own carving tools,
from the great boulder stone as large as this whole room to the finest
grain of sand. And that is ICE.

That piece of stone came from the side of the Rosenlaui glacier in
Switzerland, and it was polished by the glacier ice. The glacier melted
and shrank this last hot summer farther back than it had done for many
years, and left bare sheets of rock, which it had been scraping at for
ages, with all the marks fresh upon them. And that bit was broken off
and brought 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 her laws become broken; that, as that great philosopher
Sir Charles Lyell will tell you, when you read his books, Madam How is
making and unmaking the surface of the earth now, by exactly the same
means as she was making and unmaking ages and ages since; and that what
is going on slowly and surely in the Alps in Switzerland was going on
once here where we stand.

It is very difficult, I know, for a little boy like you to understand how
ice, and much more how soft snow, should have such strength that it can
grind this little stone, much more such strength as to grind whole
mountains into plains. You have never seen ice and snow do harm. You
cannot even recollect the Crimean Winter, as it was called then; and well
for you you cannot, considering all the misery it brought at home and
abroad. You cannot, I say, recollect the Crimean Winter, when the Thames
was frozen over above the bridges, and the ice piled in little bergs ten
to fifteen feet high, which lay, some of them, stranded on the shores,
about London itself, and did not melt, if I recollect, until the end of
May. You never stood, as I stood, in the great winter of 1837-8 on
Battersea Bridge, to see the ice break up with the tide, and saw the
great slabs and blocks leaping and piling upon