ot, and there melts bit by bit. The long black lines which
you see winding along the white and green ice of the glacier are the
stones which have fallen from the cliffs above. They will be dropped at
the end of the glacier, and mixed with silt and sand and other stones
which have come down inside the glacier itself, and piled up in the field
in great mounds, which are called moraines, such as you may see and walk
on in Scotland many a time, though you might never guess what they are.

The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, you must remember, all
foul and milky with the finest mud; and that mud is the grinding of the
rocks over which the glacier has been crawling down, and scraping them as
it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles and with sand. And this is the
alphabet, which, if you learn by heart, you will learn to understand how
Madam How 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 lakes in Europe and in North America; that such lakes,
for instance, as Ullswater or Windermere have been scooped clean out of
the solid rock by ice which came down these glaciers in old times. And
be sure of this, that next to Madam How's steam-pump and her rain-spade,
her great ice-plough has had, and has still, the most to do with making
the ground on which we live.

Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here? No, I do not. There have
been glaciers in Scotland in plenty. And if any Scotch boy shall read
this book, 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 you live, I will show you in any gravel-pit, or
hollow lane upon the moor, the marks, not of a glacier, which is an ice-
river, but of a whole sea of ice.

Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look carefully at
what we see there. The lower part of the pit of course is a solid rock
of sand. On the top of that is a cap of gravel, five, six, ten feet
thick. Now the sand was laid down there by water at the bottom of an old
sea; and therefore the top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as
the sands at Hunstanton or at Bou