The Strange Adventures of a Pebble

by Hallam Hawksworth

CHAPTER III

(MARCH)

With rushing winds and gloomy skies

The dark and stubborn Winter dies;

Far off, unseen, Spring faintly cries,

Bidding her earliest child arise.

—Bayard Taylor.

THE SOUL OF THE SPRING AND THE LANDS OF ETERNAL SNOW

And that's how the Old Men of the Mountain visited us in the Ice Age and what they did and how they did it. But now that they have all been back home so long don't you think it would be nice and polite to return the call—especially when you remember all they did for us, making beautiful lakes and rivers and waterfalls and mountain scenery?

I. Springtime in the Alps

The best time to do this would be in the spring, because then the kingdom of the glaciers is most beautiful, and the spirit of a glorious new world, just waking up, is abroad everywhere. The glaciers themselves seem to feel so good about it that they start to sing. And like the birds, their joyous springtime mood responds to the quick changes of sun and shade. In our own land when the sky grows cloudy, even for a short time as you may have noticed, birds stop singing. Then when the sky clears they start up again. But, up here in the Alps in the spring when the birds are singing among the mountain meadows, the glaciers, at whose feet these meadows lie, do the very same thing. The songs of the birds are various, and the song of the same bird will differ at different times of day, but the song of the glacier is always the same—a pleasant dreamy tune between the murmur of little voices and the tinkle of distant bells.

The very rocks that the glacier carries on its back seem to catch the spirit of the springtime; for, when the weather is bright, they go strolling. And when they do they remind us a little of that painting by Franz Hals, "The Laughing Cavalier," for they apparently wear a big broad-brimmed hat cocked jauntily on one side.

UP WHERE THE GLACIERS GROW

Here we are, looking down on the roof of the Alps—from a flying-machine, let us say. The sky-line used to be more like the ridge of a house, straight across. In the course of the ages the glaciers and the weather have cut down the softer rock, leaving those peaks. At the top are the snow-fields. Farther down the glaciers begin to form. Still farther down, where the glaciers have begun to melt, you can see a stream—its waters have taken white in the picture because of the foam and the ground-up rock in it called "rock flour"—falling into the woods below, the "timber line" of your geography. Ruskin has a wonderful word-picture of these mountain streams in his "Modern Painters." The index of any edition will tell you where.

THE MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE ICE AGE

The Alps are the most famous of all the homes of the glaciers, not only because of the great number of the glaciers and the beauty of the scenery, but because it was in the Alps that Agassiz, living in a little stone hut among the mountains, studied the glaciers and their ways and proved that it was these strange creatures of snow and ice that had come down during the Ice Age and worked such marvellous changes on the face of the earth. In the Alps, just as Muir found them doing among the glaciers of Alaska, the flowers bloom at the very edge of the snow line. And they come on much more rapidly than they do in temperate climates. As fast as the snow melts back blossoms just cover the meadows thick with the deepest, richest colors—blue, red, white, yellow, purple, and every shade of these. Some of these flowers are as pure white as the snows. The queen of beauty among them all, many think, is the Alpine rose. In that pure, clear air its color seems actually to glow like the famous peak, the Jungfrau, at sunrise.

LOUIS AGASSIZ

The great teacher who discovered the Ice Age.

One little flower is in such a hurry, so afraid it will miss the first May party, that it blooms under the ice and melts its own way right up through. Then it calls to the bees and the butterflies, in the way that flowers have:

"Good morning! It's spring, and here I am again and how do you do? Come and kiss me!"

The soldanella grows among the thick pebble beds and the big boulders right on the edges of the glaciers. It is a member of the primrose family. It may be pink, white, or blue. The blue flowers are most common. But blue, pink, or white, these baby bells are always born twins; two sisters side by side on the same stalk, showing their dear fairy faces just above those layers of ice. They are such delicate little things you wonder how they can ever stand it. But ice, pshaw, they don't mind it at all.

BLUSHING A WAY THROUGH THE ICE

If you are a bashful boy or girl you can understand how the Misses Soldanella have been able, in spite of their icy covering, to get here to greet us on this lovely May morning. You know how warm your face feels when you blush. It seems to be somewhat the same way with all flowers when they blush into bloom. The blossom becomes quite a little warmer than any other part of the plant. It is the heat of the growing buds and, still more, the heat of the blossoms that melts a passage for the Soldanellas through the ice, for they often blossom before they get above the ice at all.

The higher we climb the brighter the flowers, and they grow in thicker masses, and each kind spreads out into larger fields than they did where we came from down below—great belts of blue gentians, whole fields of golden yellow globe flowers. You'd hardly expect this, would you? And you'll be still more surprised at the reason. Did you notice, as shown in their pictures, that the Soldanellas have only the bees for their callers? Just look if you can see any bees where we are now. Not a bee. But butterflies everywhere. And that's the answer. The flowers of the upper meadows are brighter, grow thicker and spread wider—all on account of the butterflies; to get the butterfly "trade."

WHY THE BEES GET OUT OF BREATH

Bees can't climb to such heights because the air is very thin, and, therefore, harder to fly in. Remember their little bodies are heavy and their wings are small. They get out of breath, like a fat man with short legs working his way up Pike's Peak. The butterflies, on the other hand, have small bodies and large wings, and so have the meadows of the higher Alps all to themselves. That the flowers here look so brilliant is partly due to the thinness and clearness of the air and partly to the disposition of the butterflies. A bee is all business, because she has so many mouths to feed at home, and is laying up honey for the days of the long winter. Mr. and Mrs. Butterfly, on the other hand, are gay and carefree society people.

"We have no family waiting to be fed, so why worry?" This is the butterfly philosophy. Only a sip of nectar now and then for their personal wants; for the rest of the day the merry air dance, here, there, everywhere! They flit long distances without lighting. To attract the bee's attention a blossom need be neither large nor bright, as the bee goes straight from flower to flower, wasting no time in aimless flights. But to catch the eye of the butterfly the flowers must be brilliantly colored and grow in large masses. So up in the butterfly zone only brilliant flowers, and those having the habit of growing in groups produce seed and have descendants. Those that dress plainly and are not fond of company die out.

HOW THE SOLDANELLA SISTERS GOT TO THE MAY-PARTY THROUGH THE SNOW

Now didn't it turn out just as I said; that the butterflies themselves help brighten the flowers that grow among these ice fields? I have something else quite as curious to tell you: Both the Alpine butterflies and the flowers were left over from the Ice Age. Not in the same sense that we pebbles were, for we are the identical little passengers who rode in on the ice trains, and the life of a butterfly, as every one knows, is very short. So is that of a flower. Yet suppose you found that the only other butterflies and flowers like these are found, not among the flowers and butterflies in the lands lower down in the Alps but up toward the Arctic Zone, in Finland and Lapland; in the snow regions of mountains in the temperate zone all over the world? It would look very much as if these flowers and butterflies, or their ancestors, had been left behind there some time or other, wouldn't it? This is what the men of science think, and they reason about it in this way:

HOW THE BUTTERFLIES MISSED THE TRAIN

As the glaciers spread downward from the Far North in the Ice Age they brought all their home things with them—climate, plants, insects, animals. Plant and animal life was driven step by step before the advancing ice. Then, as the ice melted, flowers, butterflies, and all followed their natural climate back. But those that lingered too long in the meadows around the mountain tops could not cross the hot summer plains that now lay between them and the retiring ice sheet; for plants and animals that are used to cold can't stand the heat any more than those from the tropics can stand the cold. So only the flowers and butterflies remained in the temperate zone that found their natural climate among the mountain peaks and stayed there.

Near the top of Mount Washington, the highest peak in New Hampshire, is a colony of the descendants of these butterfly pilgrims from the north who never leave their high and wind swept meadows. There are no such butterflies in the hills and plains below, but go into Labrador and you will see plenty of them.

LEFT-OVER PIECES OF THE ICE AGE

Of course you understood all along that these aren't the very same butterflies that came with the glaciers, yet in shady glens in high mountains, where the snow never melts, people do sometimes find masses of ice, which, there is every reason to believe, have been there since the Ice Age. And sometimes thick veins of ice, buried hundreds of feet under pebbles, boulders and soil, are struck in sinking wells. These are known as ice wells; huge ice water tanks that never need filling!

II. A Little Visit with the Glaciers

But if the ice masses in the shady glens and under the old moraines may be said to be pieces of the Ice Age left over, the glaciers of to-day are, in a sense, the Ice Age itself. For these glaciers do, on a smaller scale, what Mr. Labrador and his partners in northern America, Europe, and Asia did on a large scale so many centuries ago. Suppose now, like Agassiz, we trace a glacier to its source. It will be a long journey, all steep, some of it almost straight up, and along chasms of slippery ice with sudden storms that hide the chasms and blind your eyes and take away your breath. The first part of our journey is over a field of ice, gray with the dirt of weathered rock from the mountain sides. Along its borders are those sharp-edged stones neatly packed in rows, that our geography tells us are called "lateral moraines." It has another row of these stones sticking up right in the middle of its back, like the sharp-pointed vertebræ of the ceratosaurus.

By noon, as often happens in the Alps as elsewhere at this time of year, a rain comes up and we lunch under the shelter of a tumbled heap of rocks. Watching the downpour drift across the desolate wastes we think what jolly times like this Agassiz and his companions had in their little hall of science under the big stone. After lunch we start again, and although it's stiff going, and it takes a lot of this thin air to make one good breath, we spare a little, now and then, for shouting, to hear the wonderful play of the echoes among the mountains. We go through all kinds of weather—rain, mist, snow. Then suddenly we burst into blinding light. The sun is so dazzling on the snow, now no longer covered with dirt and mountain débris, that we must all put on our colored glasses. In some places, among bare rocks that absorb the sun's heat, it is positively sultry.

The fields around us look like an ocean turned to stone. Waves are formed in the surface ice of the glacier because surface ice moves faster than the main mass beneath. On the bordering mountain walls the ice rises into still greater waves "foaming about the feet of the dark central crests like the surf of enormous breakers." And this great, still image of the parent sea, from which the air currents carried the moisture that made it, has eddies and whirlpools, and like the troubled sea, "whose waters cast up mire and dirt," the glacier, where it swirls along its shores, works pebbles and dirt to the surface. Often this material is carried into the centre of a whirl, as sea weeds and the rubbish of the seashore are driven into eddies among the rocks.

Somebody must have been here just ahead of us. Isn't that a dark glove over there? We come closer. What at a distance seems to be a glove proves to be a hole in the ice so deep it looks dark. Lying flat and carefully peering over the edge we look into something strangely beautiful—an ice palace, with icicles in fantastic groups hanging from the roof. Through this roof the sun comes in delicate floods of pale green light, the combination of the yellow rays with the blue of the ice. We drop pebbles into the hole. They rattle down and down with long, dull echoes, dying away. We can hear the murmur of running water. Gusts of cold air come up that bite like the wind on a sharp winter day.

These underground palaces of art start as great cracks in the ice, called "crevasses," from a French word meaning a crevice. They can usually be seen plainly as yawning chasms, but sometimes are so bridged over by the snows that a small, dark hole is all you see. And we might not see that in time. This would be very bad, for these snow bridges are often quite thin. One might like to go down in a crevasse and explore about in this beautiful dream world—but not when one wasn't looking!

Even when one is looking and is as careful as can be it's dangerous. But still you may be sure that the famous men who have studied glaciers have done it, for every true man of science likes to get at the bottom of things. It was Agassiz who first went down in this way into the heart of a glacier. It was while he was making his studies in the Alps, and he came very near being drowned in one of the streams that always flow at the bottom of a crevasse, for these crevasses, breaking up the ice, increase the rate of melting. (You know broken ice will not keep so well as a big block.)

WHAT TWO BOYS SAW IN THE FAIRYLAND OF ICE

When you have read John Muir's story of how he climbed down into a crevasse in California in his shirt-sleeves (see H. & S.) you will know that he was the other of the "two boys" I refer to, one of them being Louis Agassiz, whose adventure in this fairy iceland down in the glaciers is told in this chapter. Don't look dangerous at a distance, do they, those crevasses? Remind one of the crimps in a Christmas pie. But notice the difference when you get up close to one of them in the next picture.

BUT THESE SCIENTISTS WILL BE BOYS

Agassiz had been lowered by a rope. When his feet suddenly plunged into the icy stream his shout for help was misunderstood by his friends and he was lowered still further. His second cry, which you may be sure promptly followed the first, showed that something had gone wrong and he was drawn out. The worst of it was that coming up he had to steer his course among those huge icicles, any one of which, being worn away or broken loose by the friction of the rope and striking his head, would probably have killed him. But they are always doing things like that—these men of science. They keep on being as curious and enthusiastic about the things they are interested in as any boy.

THOSE LITTLE CURVED LINES WHEN YOU GET UP CLOSE

This is what those little curved lines are—really; great yawning chasms in the ice. The sun is shining from the left; a morning sun, probably, as those tourists are out for a walk. This scene must be pretty well down the glacier's course, far from the upper fields, for you see these people are just in ordinary dress—not in the dress of mountain-climbers, with ropes and Alpine stocks and everything.

It is perfectly safe to climb glaciers as we are doing—in a book—but they are really ticklish things to go about on, as well as down into. To find out all the interesting things you can so easily get through pictures and the printed page took years of skillful study, ingenuity, and endless patience and much courage. What a little further on in this chapter you will learn about the movements of glaciers in seven minutes, it took Agassiz seven long years to find out and make sure of. To Agassiz more than to any other one man the world owes the tremendous idea of the Ice Age and its story. His home among the glaciers of these Alps—named playfully by the devoted scholars who worked with him the "Hôtel des Neuchatelois"—was a rude shelter under a projecting rock. The results of this long study he published in a work in two volumes, and so made known the great facts he had found and the theory about an Ice Age which he based upon them and which is now everywhere accepted. He became professor of geology at Harvard University and as famous a teacher as he was a student of nature. After his great and useful life was ended he was buried in his adopted land with a boulder from the site of the little stone hut on the glacier for his monument.

III. The Soul of the Glacier

Many of the fellow-countrymen of Agassiz, the peasants of the Swiss Alps, believe the glacier is a living thing and has a soul. In the spring the peasants take their sheep and cattle into the high meadows called "alps," from which the mountains get their name, and remain there until fall with the glaciers all around them. There are nearly 2,000 glaciers in the Alps, varying from less than a mile to over ten miles in length, and from a few hundred feet to a mile in breadth. So the peasants have every opportunity to get acquainted with their big white neighbors.

"The glacier has a soul," they say, "and a voice, many voices. Sometimes he groans. This is when he is in pain. Listen!"

SOUNDS THAT GIVE ONE THE "CREEPS"

We do hear a sound very like a groan. Even experienced mountain climbers can hardly keep down a "creepy" feeling when they hear it. This sound is made when the ice is cracking into a crevasse and while it is enlarging. These crevasses are formed by various strains in the ice as it moves along. So long as the strain which caused them continues the crevasses keep widening. The "groans" may be said to be "growing pains."

In some places you hear a constant roaring sound. The peasants are not superstitious about this sound however. They know it is made by what they call the "moulins" or mills of the glacier. Water, melting on the surface, makes streams. These, running together, make a larger stream. This stream, coming to a crack in the ice where a crevasse is just beginning, pours down, hollows out a little shaft and joins streams in the interior of the glacier, like that in which Agassiz took a bath when he didn't want to. The noise of the water, striking far below, comes up through the shaft, as a voice comes up through a speaking tube. But the crack into which the water falls must be very narrow, so that the water can melt both walls and thus form a shaft; otherwise it merely glides down the nearer wall and makes no sound.

NOISES WE PEBBLES HELP MAKE

Where two ice rivers emptying into a main stream come together you hear a constant dull rattle and rumble. This is made by the blocks of stone and trains of pebbles that have ridden in on the backs of the two glaciers thus going into partnership, falling between the glaciers at the point where they come together. The stones that do not fall over are brought together in the centre of the glacier and so make that spiny backbone of his, the "medial moraine." The rows of stones on the two sides of the glacier, called the "lateral moraines," have fallen piece by piece from the mountain walls as the glacier moved along between them.

But the strangest thing about the voices of the glaciers I have yet to tell. Whenever the sun is shining brightly, as I have said, and the gentians and the globe flowers open their petals and the birds start the chorus of the day, the glacier begins singing, too, humming to itself a pleasant tune. When the sky grows cloudy, even for a short time, the birds stop singing, the flowers cover their faces, the bees and butterflies hurry to shelter, and the glacier's song gradually dies away. Any cloud may bring rain, as far as the flowers and the bees and the butterflies know, and, for the same reason, the winged people hurry to cover because they don't want to get their wings wet. The flowers hide their faces to keep the rain from washing their pollen away, and the birds stop singing because, like the rest of us, they don't feel so cheerful under gloomy skies. But the glacier, why does he stop singing too? Because that murmuring tinkle you heard was made by the water melting on the glacier and running into rivulets a little way under its surface. When the sun stops shining the surface ice stops melting, the water gradually quits running and the murmur of the song dies away.

ON THE ROOF OF THE ANDES, WHERE IT'S TOO COLD TO GROW GLACIERS

It is because of these queer human habits of the glacier and, above all, his sensitive response to the moods of days and seasons, that many of the mountain people insist he is not only a living creature, but that he has a soul. We think of all this now as the western sun drops behind the snowy summits, the glacier's song grows silent, and we hear, mingling with the vespers of the birds, voices echoing from crag to crag the words of the psalm, "Praise ye the Lord." These are the voices, of the herdsmen speaking to each other from alp to alp—the evening call to prayer.

IV. How the Snow Men, the Glaciers, and the Rocks Go Walking

Now that we have learned how glaciers, wild flowers, and butterflies get up into this high world, by climbing up here ourselves in the beautiful springtime, the next thing, I suppose, is to climb down again. But first just look over the edge here and you can get some notion of how high we are, not merely in feet and figures, as we have it in the table of mountain heights in our geography, but in actual feeling.

"What are those little blocks, all ruled off like a chessboard, away down there?"

"Those are the little Swiss farms with the gray roads between."

"And those small white things among the farms that look like pieces of grit?"

"Those are the Swiss villages."

"And the black specks on the slopes of the mountain?"

"Those are tourists with their guides, coming up. People, no doubt, whom we should like to know, but we shall have an interesting new acquaintance travelling down with us. You've met some of his family, no doubt, for he's an ice man. There are several of these ice men always travelling down on the glaciers."

THE OLD MAN OF BALISTAN

Where would you say, judging from the head-dress of the man in the middle, this scene is located? Somewhere in Asia, wouldn't you? For in Asia the natives, particularly the Mahometans, wear turbans, as you would learn by simply looking up "turban" in a dictionary. And wouldn't those summer helmets lead you to suppose that this is a hot climate, in spite of the great ice-pillar and the snow-field? And don't those helmets suggest Englishmen? Now, where in Asia would you find vast mountains, a hot climate, Mahometans, and Englishmen together? Yes, to be sure, in the Himalayas of India. And that's just where an expedition of English scientists came across this grotesque creature of stone and ice one summer day, on a glacier in Balistan. So I just called him "The Old Man of Balistan."

You'll know one of them the moment you see him, for they are queer-looking fellows with only one leg—or rather one leg at a time—and they wear big stone hats. They never go walking without them. They can't.

LOOKS LIKE A BROTHER, BUT HE'S NO RELATION

This "old man" is a creature, not of the snows but of the winds. The capstone—apparently conglomerate, it looks so rough and pebbly—tumbled down from the mountains once upon a time and found a resting place on a bed of softer rock, a section of which became separated from the mass on either side by those earth cracks called "joints." Then the winds and other instruments of weathering got their fingers in these cracks, wore the neighboring sections away, and left this pillar standing. It is broader at the bottom because the winds, checked by the obstacles on the ground, didn't strike with such force as they did higher up.

To the group of boys and girls to whom I first told these stories of my life and adventures nothing was more interesting than this account of the ice men who walk. On that occasion I called them snow men because the boys had just been making a snow man, and these ice men up here, like the glaciers on which they always travel, are made of snow turned to ice. You have heard the expression "clothes make the man," but in the case of these men of the snows it is literally true, so far as their hats are concerned, for it is their hats that make them grow.

"I bite," said the High School Boy, "what's the answer?"

CAN YOU SOLVE THIS PICTURE PUZZLE?

For reply I roughly sketched the picture at the top of the page. From this hint my audience thought out the answer for themselves. See if you can do so before you learn, in the next few paragraphs, what the answer is.

It comes about like this. One day we see a big stone lying on the glacier, and when we come that way again several days later this same stone is standing on a tall pillar of ice. We notice the stone hat is tilted forward a little, apparently to shade this queer man's face, which is always turned directly toward the sun. It sits jauntily on one side—this hat of his—as if he were feeling particularly contented with himself and the world on this sunny day and had started for a stroll.

And it really is because the sun is so bright that the hat is tipped. Moreover it is because of the sunshine that the man takes a stroll. If, after more days of sunshine, we return we see the same stone further down the slope of the glacier and apparently standing on the same leg.

"But does he or it actually walk on that leg?"

(The audience, who at first thought I was joking, had begun to believe I was in earnest.)

Yes, that leg and others. Before this Alpine tourist ends his travels down to the valleys below he may have, all told, as many legs as a centipede, but only one at a time. Like the legs of the amœba and the claws of the crab they are renewed as wanted. A big stone falling from the mountain side upon a glacier protects the ice beneath from the sun's rays, so, as the ice melts down around it, the stone is left standing on a pillar. These "glacier tables" (to use the scientific term) are formed on the south sides of glaciers where there is the most sun. Owing to the slant of the rays the rock is heated most on the south end and so tips in that direction more and more. Finally it falls off and, in so doing, pitches farther down the slope. Then a new pillar is formed and the whole process is gone through again.

(If we should get lost up here any one of these snow men will tell us the way out. The snow man's hat, for the reason stated, always tips toward the south.)

The stones of the winter lands are not only like human beings in the fact that they walk, but like little human beings in the fact that when they are small they can't. In one of the pictures I drew for the boys and girls—that representing the ice pillar from which the stone has slipped—you may be able to make out a little pebble. It got a ride because it was hiding under the big stone. Left to itself "it wouldn't have a leg to stand on," as the saying goes, for small stones are heated through by the sun and so sink down into the ice and form no "legs."

From a photograph copyrighted by Merl La Voy

THE RUSH OF THE AVALANCHE

It's seldom you can get a snap-shot at an avalanche—it's so sudden! Then, when you do get one you must be an expert or your picture will be a blur. This picture was taken by Merl La Voy. An interesting thing about it is that the scene is on Mount McKinley, which, as your geography will tell you, is the highest mountain in North America. The avalanche started near the top, where the greatest fields of loose snow lie. We see it in the act of plunging into a vast crevasse several miles below, and sending up clouds of snow. They look like steam.

MR. GLACIER'S CATERPILLAR TRACTOR

"The glaciers," says Reclus, "seem as motionless as the peaks that tower above them." Nevertheless, as we know, they do move. While the motion is in so many respects like that of a river that glaciers are often called "ice rivers," they have motions and, so to say, "methods" that curiously suggest the inventions of men. Take, for example, the way they climb down a steep hill; for all the world like the "tanks" in the Great War. The tanks, you remember, made nothing of shell holes, rough country, ravines, or trenches, but lumbered and crushed their way along, resistless as the Fates. And, you may also recall, the tanks moved by laying sections of themselves—the great cleats on the outside belt—which they picked up again, as they advanced. This was called the "caterpillar tractor" system of travelling.

Now watch the glacier when it comes to an incline much steeper than its ordinary slope. It breaks across in sections at right angles to its bed, and section after section drops down. Then the forward sections crowded upon by those in the rear are pushed up close, freeze together again, and on goes the glacier as good as new.

As a traveller, however, it is a little slow. It made faster time in the old days—in the Ice Age—when glaciers were so much larger, but to-day, at the rate at which ordinary glaciers travel, it may take a boulder as big as Plymouth Rock something like a hundred years to be carried from the upper fields to the heap of stones and soil which your geography calls a "terminal moraine," and where Mr. Glacier says:

"All out! Far as we go."

HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY

How would you like to go to school to the pretty Misses Soldanella? They can teach you a lot about botany. If you learn what an unusual thing they do with their leaves, for instance, that will lead you to follow up leaves in general. Leaves are wonderful things. Indeed, it isn't often you find the leaf of a book that will tell you half as much as the leaf of a plant, if you only know how to read it.

In Grant Allen's "Flash Lights on Nature," you will find that the Soldanella sisters store food in their leaves all winter just as we put things away in the cellar, and how this helps them get up so early in the spring; why the fact that the little sisters are not very tall makes them hurry so; and why if they didn't hurry they wouldn't get to the party at all!

What other members of the primrose family do you know?

See what you can find about our earliest flowers—hepatica, bloodroot, dog-toothed violet, jack-in-the-pulpit, Dutchman's breeches, anemones.

If you will examine closely many early spring buds and flowers—especially those like the willow and hazel catkins—you will find that they too keep warm and grow in the early spring, not from the warmth of the sun alone but from the fuel they have laid up in their buds.

Did you know that to see the very first flowers of all in the spring you must look up—away above your head? (Maple.)

Any good book on Alaska will tell a number of striking things about how rapidly spring comes on in the lands where glaciers grow.

Get Muir's "Mountains of California" and hear him tell about how he went down into a crevasse in his shirt-sleeves, and of the fairy underworld he found there, and how he hated to come away.

Reclus[11] tells how the glaciers not only come down to call on the farmers, sometimes, but even help them pick cherries!

[11] "The Earth."

I suppose the children who go to the excellent Swiss schools take delight in telling grandmother that Mr. Glacier isn't really a person—as he is in the tales of the winter fireside—but wouldn't both grandmother and the children open their eyes if they knew that in Greenland there is a glacier so big it feeds itself and makes its own snow and its own storms and everything? Hobb's "The Face of the Earth" tells all about it.

And the Encyclopædia Britannica and Hobbs together will tell you how to make a good glacier. There are a half-dozen things you must remember or your glacier won't turn out right. (1) You must take plenty of snow; (2) and keep it in a cool place; (3) but you must warm it a little too, once in a while; (4) your mountain gorges must not be too steep; (5) you must have your mountains set just so; (6) and distribute your storms with care. By doing all these things you get fine, durable glaciers, 100 to 200 feet thick, sometimes 500 and even 1,000 feet thick. But you must be careful, and, of course, it takes time.