I. What I Brought Back from the Creek
I met a rain-drop once that had followed the thing through, starting where a little creek began, and got such a load of information I could hardly carry it, about the wonderful part the rivers take and have taken in the making and remaking of the world.
We see the April rains carve fairy canyons in the soft clay of the roadside or the creek, but it is hard to realize, as we stand on some pinnacle of the Alps and look out over the deep and wide valleys, the gorges, the cliffs, and mountains cut in two, that all are but the handiwork of the rain-drops banded together as flowing waters. For a long time this was questioned by scientific men, because the idea so upset the old theory that great changes in this world of ours came about all of a sudden and from causes not at work in these days. Now, however, nobody doubts that the big things are done by the little people, working together over long periods of time; little snowflakes, little rain-drops, little cells in plants. As a result, the Alps, so far as the expression of their faces is concerned, are as little like the Alps of the past as the face of the old farm of to-day is like the farm of those ancient yesterdays, when the brontosaurus browsed where old Dobbin is nipping the meadow grass and the mammoth ate the leaves of trees that stood where White Face is thoughtfully chewing her cud in the shade.
HOW THEY STUDY GEOGRAPHY IN BOSTON
This is what, in the Boston schools, they call an "umbrella party." "Umbrella party" sounds much more attractive than "geography lesson," but as a matter of fact it is a geography lesson and a fine one. As soon as they get off that brick pavement the boys and girls will see those rain-drops cutting out little Mississippi River systems, filling little Great Lakes, plunging over Niagaras two inches high!
Right where you sit reading, perhaps, the land used to be buried two miles deep beneath rocks which have been worn away by wind and rain and by rivers which vanished long ago. Everything has been so changed that if the old scenery should be put back you would be lost right on the home farm.
WHERE YOU CAN JUMP ACROSS THE MISSISSIPPI
Wrinkles in the earth and in the mountainsides make the first troughs for the streamlets and the rivers, and then the running water itself digs these natural channels deeper. Many rivers begin as streamlets flowing out of springs. The great Mississippi began as a baby, just like the rest of us. You can jump across it still if you go up to its source. Springs not only start rivers in life but go on feeding them. Most large river systems get secret gifts in this way, as they flow along, from thousands of springs that empty into them or their tributaries.
So springs start and feed the rivers. Now what do you suppose starts the springs? Rain-drops stored away in big stone "safes," much as a small boy stores away pennies in his tin bank! The water of rains and melting snows, passing down through the soil, soaks into the little chambers or pores in such rocks as sandstone and limestone, and keeps going on down until it comes to a bed of hard stone, such as slate or granite, into which it cannot soak.