“I’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “I had intended to do it from the first.”
The next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the ledge to take in the wide landscape of the Kennebec below us, I chanced to look down at my feet and saw, cut deep in the smooth surface of the stone, several parallel lines.
“Don’t blast out this rock!” I exclaimed. “Tear down your schoolhouse rather. Build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone. This is part of a great book.”
“I don’t understand,” said the supervisor.
“Here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. These lines were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the Ice Age. Don’t blot it out. Put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it, translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.”
He did. There was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the rock, telling of the Ice Age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out the valley of the Kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and inditing this manuscript for Good-Will Farm School ages later.
So much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone! Now add to your science history. Instead of the scratch of a glacier, let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be—“1620.” Now read—if you can read and understand.
I copy it verbatim from a Freshman college theme:
Plymouth Rock
Plymouth Rock is situated in Plymouth Mass. It is the rock upon which the Mayflower landed in 1620. But it is not now where it was then. It was moved many years ago up to the street. And when they moved it it broke. But they cemented it together. It is four or five feet long; and three or four feet wide; and it is inscribed with the famous figures 1620, to celebrate the landing of the Puritans at that time. It is enclosed within a canopy of stone and an iron fence; but the gate is hardly ever closed. There are a great many famous stones in the world but this is as famous as any.
My mother was visiting me. She is a self-contained old Quaker, and this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had even seen New England! What should we do first? What did she most desire to see? “Take me to see Plymouth Rock first,” she said; and we were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. As we entered Plymouth, however, I noticed that mother had grown silent, and that her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to her moods, was also silent. We descended the hill to the harbor, came on in sight of the canopy over the Rock, and slowed down to stop. But the car had not stopped, when mother, the back door open, her foot on the running-board, was stepping off and through the open gate, where, falling on her knees, with tears running down her face, she kissed the blessed stone, her daughter calling, “O Mother, the germs! the germs!”