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.