h green grass.

And how far off are they?

How I should like to walk up to the top of that one which looks quite
close.

You will find it a long walk up there; three miles, I dare say, over
black bogs and banks of rock, and up corries and cliffs which you could
not climb. There are plenty of cows on that mountain: and yet they look
so small, you could not see them, nor I either, without a glass. That
long white streak, zigzagging down the mountain side, is a roaring
cataract of foam five hundred feet high, full now with last night's rain;
but by this afternoon it will have dwindled to a little thread; and to-
morrow, when you get up, if no more rain has come down, it will be gone.
Madam How works here among the mountains swiftly and hugely, and
sometimes terribly enough; as you shall see when you have had your
breakfast, and come down to the bridge with me.

But what a beautiful place it is! Flowers and woods and a lawn; and what
is that great smooth patch in the lawn just under the window?

Is it an empty flower-bed?

Ah, thereby hangs a strange tale. We will go and look at it after
breakfast, and then you shall see with your own eyes one of the wonders
which I have been telling you of.

And what is that shining between the trees?

Water.

Is it a lake?

Not a lake, though there are plenty round here; that is salt water, not
fresh. Look away to the right, and you see it through the opening of the
woods again and again: and now look above the woods. You see a faint
blue line, and gray and purple lumps like clouds, which rest upon it far
away. That, child, is the great Atlantic Ocean, and those are islands in
the far west. The water which washes the bottom of the lawn was but a
few months ago pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bahamas and
Florida, and swept away here as the great ocean river of warm water which
we call the Gulf Stream, bringing with it out of the open ocean the
shoals of mackerel, and the porpoises and whales which feed upon them.
Some fine afternoon we will run down the bay and catch strange fishes,
such as you never saw before, and very likely see a living whale.

What? such a whale as they get whalebone from, and which eats sea-moths?

No, they live far north, in the Arctic circle; these are grampuses, and
bottle-noses, which feed on fish; not so big as the right whales, but
quite big enough to astonish you, if one comes up and blows close to the
boat. Get yourself