dressed and come down, and then we will go out; we
shall have plenty to see and talk of at every step.

Now, you have finished your breakfast at last, so come along, and we
shall see what we shall see. First run out across the gravel, and
scramble up that bank of lawn, and you will see what you fancied was an
empty flower-bed.

Why, it is all hard rock.

Ah, you are come into the land of rocks now: out of the land of sand and
gravel; out of a soft young corner of the world into a very hard, old,
weather-beaten corner; and you will see rocks enough, and too many for
the poor farmers, before you go home again.

But how beautifully smooth and flat the rock is: and yet it is all
rounded.

What is it like?

Like--like the half of a shell.

Not badly said, but think again.

Like--like--I know what it is like. Like the back of some great monster
peeping up through the turf.

You have got it. Such rocks as these are called in Switzerland "roches
moutonnees," because they are, people fancy, like sheep's backs. Now
look at the cracks and layers in it. They run across the stone; they
have nothing to do with the shape of it. You see that?

Yes: but here are cracks running across them, all along the stone, till
the turf hides them.

Look at them again; they are no cracks; they do not go into the stone.

I see. They are scratched; something like those on the elder-stem at
home, where the cats sharpen their claws. But it would take a big cat to
make them.

Do you recollect what I told you of Madam How's hand, more flexible than
any hand of man, and yet strong enough to grind the mountains into paste?

I know. Ice! ice! ice! But are these really ice-marks?

Child, on the place where we now stand, over rich lawns, and warm woods,
and shining lochs, lay once on a time hundreds, it may be thousands, of
feet of solid ice, crawling off yonder mountain-tops into the ocean there
outside; and this is one of its tracks. See how the scratches all point
straight down the valley, and straight out to sea. Those mountains are
2000 feet high: but they were much higher once; for the ice has planed
the tops off them. Then, it seems to me, the ice sank, and left the
mountains standing out of it about half their height, and at that level
it stayed, till it had planed down all those lower moors of smooth bare
rock between us and the Western ocean; and then it sank again, and
dwindled back, leaving moraines (that is, heaps o