But what was going on in the meantime? Under clouds of ashes, cinders, mud, lava, three of those happy cities were buried at once—Herculaneum, Pompeii, Stabiae. They were buried just as the people had fled from them, leaving the furniture and the earthenware, often even jewels and gold, behind, and here and there among them a human being who had not had time to escape from the dreadful deluge of dust. The ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii have been dug into since; and the paintings, especially in Pompeii, are found upon the walls still fresh, preserved from the air by the ashes which have covered them in. When you are older you perhaps will go to Naples, and see in its famous museum the curiosities which have been dug out of the ruined cities; and you will walk, I suppose, along the streets of Pompeii and see the wheel-tracks in the pavement, along which carts and chariots rumbled 2000 years ago. Meanwhile, if you go nearer home, to the Crystal Palace and to the Pompeian Court, as it is called, you will see an exact model of one of these old buried houses, copied even to the very paintings on the wells, and judge for yourself, as far as a little boy can judge, what sort of life these thoughtless, luckless people lived 2000 years ago.

And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain? Half or more than half of the side of the old crater had been blown away, and what was left, which is now called the Monte Somma, stands in a half circle round the new cone and new crater which is burning at this very day. True, after that eruption which killed Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and did not awake for 134 years, and then again for 269 years but it has been growing more and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly a year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its crater, and streams of lava from its sides.

And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like, and what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?

What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike all over the world, whether they be large or small. Almost every volcano in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all. They, I believe, are volcanos which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year 1772. Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud suddenly covered the whole mountain. The people who dwelt around it tried to escape; but before the poor souls could get away the earth sunk beneath their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and was swallowed up with a noise as if great cannon were being fired. Forty villages and nearly 3000 people were destroyed, and where the mountain had been was only a plain of red-hot stones. In the same way, in the year 1698, the top of a mountain in Quito fell in in a single night, leaving only two immense peaks of rock behind, and pouring out great floods of mud mixed with dead fish; for there are underground lakes among those volcanos which swarm with little fish which never see the light.

But most volcanos as I say, are, or have been, the shape of the one which you see here. This is Cotopaxi, in Quito, more than 19,000 feet in height. All those sloping sides are made of cinders and ashes, braced together, I suppose, by bars of solid lava-stone inside, which prevent the whole from crumbling down. The upper part, you see, is white with snow, as far down as a line which is 15,000 feet above the sea; for the mountain is in the tropics, close to the equator, and the snow will not lie in that hot climate any lower down. But now and then the snow melts off and rushes down the mountain side in floods of water and of mud, and the cindery cone of Cotopaxi stands out black and dreadful against the clear blue sky, and then the people of that country know what is coming. The mountain is growing so hot inside that it melts off its snowy covering; and soon it will burst forth with smoke and steam, and red-hot stones and earthquakes, which will shake the ground, and roars that will be heard, it may be, hundreds of miles away.

And now for the words cone, crater, lava. If I can make you understand those words, you will see why volcanos must be in general of the shape of Cotopaxi.

Cone, crater, lava: those words make up the alphabet of volcano learning. The cone is the outside of a huge chimney; the crater is the mouth of it. The lava is the ore which is being melted in the furnace below, that it may flow out over the surface of the old land, and make new land instead.

And where is the furnace itself? Who can tell that? Under the roots of the mountains, under the depths of the sea; down "the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen: the lion's whelp hath not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it. There He putteth forth His hand upon the rock; He overturneth the mountain by the roots; He cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and His eye seeth every precious thing"—while we, like little ants, run up and down outside the earth, scratching, like ants, a few feet down, and calling that a deep ravine; or peeping a few feet down into the crater of a volcano, unable to guess what precious things may lie below—below even the fire which blazes and roars up through the thin crust of the earth. For of the inside of this earth we know nothing whatsoever: we only know that it is, on an average, several times as heavy as solid rock; but how that can be, we know not.

So let us look at the chimney, and what comes out of it; for we can see very little more.

Why is a volcano like a cone?

For the same cause for which a molehill is like a cone, though a very rough one; and that the little heaps which the burrowing beetles make on the moor, or which the ant-lions in France make in the sand, are all something in the shape of a cone, with a hole like a crater in the middle. What the beetle and the ant-lion do on a very little scale, the steam inside the earth does on a great scale. When once it has forced a vent into the outside air, it tears out the rocks underground, grinds them small against each other, often into the finest dust, and blasts them out of the hole which it has made. Some of them fall back into the hole, and are shot out again: but most of them fall round the hole, most of them close to it, and fewer of them farther off, till they are piled up in a ring round it, just as the sand is piled up round a beetle's burrow. For days, and weeks, and months this goes on; even it may be for hundreds of years: till a great cone is formed round the steam vent, hundreds or thousands of feet in height, of dust and stones, and of cinders likewise. For recollect, that when the steam has blown away the cold earth and rock near the surface of the ground, it begins blowing out the hot rocks down below, red-hot, white-hot, and at last actually melted. But these, as they are hurled into the cool air above, become ashes, cinders, and blocks of stone again, making the hill on which they fall bigger and bigger continually. And thus does wise Madam How stand in no need of bricklayers, but makes her chimneys build themselves.

And why is the mouth of the chimney called a crater?

Crater, as you know, is Greek for a cup. And the mouth of these chimneys, when they have become choked and stopped working, are often just the shape of a cup, or (as the Germans call them) kessels, which means kettles, or caldrons. I have seen some of them as beautifully and exactly rounded as if a cunning engineer had planned them, and had them dug out with the spade. At first, of course, their sides and bottom are nothing but loose stones, cinders, slag, ashes, such as would be thrown out of a furnace. But Madam How, who, whenever she makes an ugly desolate place, always tries to cover over its ugliness, and set something green to grow over it, and make it pretty once more, does so often and often by her worn-out craters. I have seen them covered with short sweet turf, like so many chalk downs. I have seen them, too, filled with bushes, which held woodcocks and wild boars. Once I came on a beautiful round crater on the top of a mountain, which was filled at the bottom with a splendid crop of potatoes. Though Madam How had not put them there herself, she had at least taught the honest Germans to put them there. And often Madam How turns her worn-out craters into beautiful lakes. There are many such crater-lakes in Italy, as you will see if ever you go there; as you may see in English galleries painted by Wilson, a famous artist who died before you were born. You recollect Lord Macaulay's ballad, "The Battle of the Lake Regillus"? Then that Lake Regillus (if I recollect right) is one of these round crater lakes. Many such deep clear blue lakes have I seen in the Eifel, in Germany; and many a curious plant have I picked on their shores, where once the steam blasted, and the earthquake roared, and the ash-clouds rushed up high into the heaven, and buried all the land around in dust, which is now fertile soil. And long did I puzzle to find out why the water stood in some craters, while others, within a mile of them perhaps, were perfectly dry. That I never found out for myself. But learned men tell me that the ashes which fall back into the crater, if the bottom of it be wet from rain, will sometimes "set" (as it is called) into a hard cement; and so make the bottom of the great bowl waterproof, as if it were made of earthenware.

But what gives the craters this cup-shape at first?

Think—While the steam and stones are being blown out, the crater is an open funnel, with more or less upright walls inside. As the steam grows weaker, fewer and fewer stones fall outside, and more and more fall back again inside. At last they quite choke up the bottom of the great round hole. Perhaps, too, the lava or melted rock underneath cools and grows hard, and that chokes up the hole lower down. Then, down from the round edge of the crater the stones and cinders roll inward more and more. The rains wash them down, the wind blows them down. They roll to the middle, and meet each other, and stop. And so gradually the steep funnel becomes a round cup. You may prove for yourself that it must be so, if you will try. Do you not know that if you dig a round hole in the ground, and leave it to crumble in, it is sure to become cup-shaped at last, though at first its sides may have been quite upright, like those of a bucket? If you do not know, get a trowel and make your little experiment.

And now you ought to understand what "cone" and "crater" mean. And more, if you will think for yourself, you may guess what would come out of a volcano when it broke out "in an eruption," as it is usually called. First, clouds of steam and dust (what you would call smoke); then volleys of stones, some cool, some burning hot; and at the last, because it lies lowest of all, the melted rock itself, which is called lava.

And where would that come out? At the top of the chimney? At the top of the cone?

No. Madam How, as I told you, usually makes things make themselves. She has made the chimney of the furnace make itself; and next she will make the furnace-door make itself.

The melted lava rises in the crater—the funnel inside the cone—but it never gets to the top. It is so enormously heavy that the sides of the cone cannot bear its weight, and give way low down. And then, through ashes and cinders, the melted lava burrows out, twisting and twirling like an enormous fiery earth-worm, till it gets to the air outside, and runs off down the mountain in a stream of fire. And so you may see (as are to be seen on Vesuvius now) two eruptions at once—one of burning stones above, and one of melted lava below.

And what is lava?

That, I think, I must tell you another time. For when I speak of it I shall have to tell you more about Madam How, and her ways of making the ground on which you stand, than I can say just now. But if you want to know (as I dare say you do) what the eruption of a volcano is like, you may read what follows. I did not see it happen; for I never had the good fortune of seeing a mountain burning, though I have seen many and many a one which has been burnt—extinct volcanos, as they are called.

The man who saw it—a very good friend of mine, and a very good man of science also—went last year to see an eruption on Vesuvius, not from the main crater, but from a small one which had risen up suddenly on the outside of it; and he gave me leave (when I told him that I was writing for children) to tell them what he saw.

This new cone, he said, was about 200 feet high, and perhaps 80 or 100 feet across at the top. And as he stood below it (it was not safe to go up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below," from the glare of the caldron, and above "faint greenish or blueish silver of indescribable beauty, from the light of the moon." But more—By good chance, the cone began to send out, not smoke only, but brilliant burning stones. "Each explosion," he says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise (such as rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind blowing through shrouds. The mountain was trembling the whole time. So it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten explosions in a minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as large as two bricks end to end. The largest ones mostly fell back into the crater; but the smaller ones being thrown higher, and more acted on by the wind, fell in immense numbers on the leeward slope of the cone" (of course, making it bigger and bigger, as I have explained already to you), and of course, as they were intensely hot and bright, making the cone look as if it too was red-hot. But it was not so, he says, really. The colour of the stones was rather "golden, and they spotted the black cone over with their golden showers, the smaller ones stopping still, the bigger ones rolling down, and jumping along just like hares." "A wonderful pedestal," he says, "for the explosion which surmounted it." How high the stones flew up he could not tell. "There was generally one which went much higher than the rest, and pierced upwards towards the moon, who looked calmly down, mocking such vain attempts to reach her." The large stones, of course, did not rise so high; and some, he says, "only just appeared over the rim of the cone, above which they came floating leisurely up, to show their brilliant forms and intense white light for an instant, and then subside again."

Try and picture that to yourselves, remembering that this was only a little side eruption, of no more importance to the whole mountain than the fall of a slate off the roof is of importance to the whole house. And then think how mean and weak man's fireworks, and even man's heaviest artillery, are compared with the terrible beauty and terrible strength of Madam How's artillery underneath our feet.

C / / A / -+ - E / / -+ - E Ground / B Ground -/ D D D + -+ + -+ -+

Now look at this figure. It represents a section of a volcano; that is, one cut in half to show you the inside. A is the cone of cinders. B, the black line up through the middle, is the funnel, or crack, through which steam, ashes, lava, and everything else rises. C is the crater mouth. D D D, which looks broken, are the old rocks which the steam heaved up and burst before it could get out. And what are the black lines across, marked E E E? They are the streams of lava which have burrowed out, some covered up again in cinders, some lying bare in the open air, some still inside the cone, bracing it together, holding it up. Something like this is the inside of a volcano.



CHAPTER IV—THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GRAIN OF SOIL

Why, you ask, are there such terrible things as volcanos? Of what use can they be?

They are of use enough, my child; and of many more uses, doubt not, than we know as yet, or ever shall know. But of one of their uses I can tell you.

They make, or help to make, divers and sundry curious things, from gunpowder to your body and mine.

What? I can understand their helping to make gunpowder, because the sulphur in it is often found round volcanos; and I know the story of the brave Spaniard who, when his fellows wanted materials for gunpowder, had himself lowered in a basket down the crater of a South American volcano, and gathered sulphur for them off the burning cliffs: but how can volcanos help to make me? Am I made of lava? Or is there lava in me?

My child, I did not say that volcanos helped to make you. I said that they helped to make your body; which is a very different matter, as I beg you to remember, now and always. Your body is no more you yourself than the hoop which you trundle, or the pony which you ride. It is, like them, your servant, your tool, your instrument, your organ, with which you work: and a very useful, trusty, cunningly-contrived organ it is; and therefore I advise you to make good use of it, for you are responsible for it. But you yourself are not your body, or your brain, but something else, which we call your soul, your spirit, your life. And that "you yourself" would remain just the same if it were taken out of your body, and put into the body of a bee, or of a lion, or any other body; or into no body at all. At least so I believe; and so, I am happy to say, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of every million have always believed, because they have used their human instincts and their common sense, and have obeyed (without knowing it) the warning of a great and good philosopher called Herder, that "The organ is in no case the power which works by it;" which is as much as to say, that the engine is not the engine-driver, nor the spade the gardener.

There have always been, and always will be, a few people who cannot see that. They think that a man's soul is part of his body, and that he himself is not one thing, but a great number of things. They think that his mind and character are only made up of all the thoughts, and feelings, and recollections which have passed through his brain; and that as his brain changes, he himself must change, and become another person, and then another person again, continually. But do you not agree with them: but keep in mind wise Herder's warning that you are not to "confound the organ with the power," or the engine with the driver, or your body with yourself: and then we will go on and consider how a volcano, and the lava which flows from it, helps to make your body.

Now I know that the Scotch have a saying, "That you cannot make broth out of whinstones" (which is their name for lava). But, though they are very clever people, they are wrong there. I never saw any broth in Scotland, as far as I know, but what whinstones had gone to the making of it; nor a Scotch boy who had not eaten many a bit of whinstone, and been all the better for it.

Of course, if you simply put the whinstones into a kettle and boiled them, you would not get much out of them by such rough cookery as that. But Madam How is the best and most delicate of all cooks; and she knows how to pound, and soak, and stew whinstones so delicately, that she can make them sauce and seasoning for meat, vegetables, puddings, and almost everything that you eat; and can put into your veins things which were spouted up red-hot by volcanos, ages and ages since, perhaps at the bottom of ancient seas which are now firm dry land.

This is very strange—as all Madam How's doings are. And you would think it stranger still if you had ever seen the flowing of a lava stream.

Out of a cave of slag and cinders in the black hillside rushes a golden river, flowing like honey, and yet so tough that you cannot thrust a stick into it, and so heavy that great stones (if you throw them on it) float on the top, and are carried down like corks on water. It is so hot that you cannot stand near it more than a few seconds; hotter, perhaps, than any fire you ever saw: but as it flows, the outside of it cools in the cool air, and gets covered with slag and cinders, something like those which you may see thrown out of the furnaces in the Black Country of Staffordshire. Sometimes these cling together above the lava stream, and make a tunnel, through the cracks in which you may see the fiery river rushing and roaring down below. But mostly they are kept broken and apart, and roll and slide over each other on the top of the lava, crashing and clanging as they grind together with a horrid noise. Of course that stream, like all streams, runs towards the lower grounds. It slides down glens, and fills them up; down the beds of streams, driving off the water in hissing steam; and sometimes (as it did in Iceland a few years ago) falls over some cliff, turning what had been a water-fall into a fire-fall, and filling up the pool below with blocks of lava suddenly cooled, with a clang and roar like that of chains shaken or brazen vessels beaten, which is heard miles and miles away. Of course, woe to the crops and gardens which stand in its way. It crawls over them all and eats them up. It shoves down houses; it sets woods on fire, and sends the steam and gas out of the tree-trunks hissing into the air. And (curiously enough) it does this often without touching the trees themselves. It flows round the trunks (it did so in a wood in the Sandwich Islands a few years ago), and of course sets them on fire by its heat, till nothing is left of them but blackened posts. But the moisture which comes out of the poor tree in steam blows so hard against the lava round that it can never touch the tree, and a round hole is left in the middle of the lava where the tree was. Sometimes, too, the lava will spit out liquid fire among the branches of the trees, which hangs down afterwards from them in tassels of slag, and yet, by the very same means, the steam in the branches will prevent the liquid fire burning them off, or doing anything but just scorch the bark.

But I can tell you a more curious story still. The lava stream, you must know, is continually sending out little jets of gas and steam: some of it it may have brought up from the very inside of the earth; most of it, I suspect, comes from the damp herbage and damp soil over which it runs. Be that as it may, a lava stream out of Mount Etna, in Sicily, came once down straight upon the town of Catania. Everybody thought that the town would be swallowed up; and the poor people there (who knew no better) began to pray to St. Agatha—a famous saint, who, they say, was martyred there ages ago—and who, they fancy, has power in heaven to save them from the lava stream. And really what happened was enough to make ignorant people, such as they were, think that St. Agatha had saved them. The lava stream came straight down upon the town wall. Another foot, and it would have touched it, and have begun shoving it down with a force compared with which all the battering-rams that you ever read of in ancient histories would be child's toys. But lo and behold! when the lava stream got within a few inches of the wall it stopped, and began to rear itself upright and build itself into a wall beside the wall. It rose and rose, till I believe in one place it overtopped the wall and began to curl over in a crest. All expected that it would fall over into the town at last: but no, there it stopped, and cooled, and hardened, and left the town unhurt. All the inhabitants said, of course, that St. Agatha had done it: but learned men found out that, as usual Madam How had done it, by making it do itself. The lava was so full of gas, which was continually blowing out in little jets, that when it reached the wall, it actually blew itself back from the wall; and, as the wall was luckily strong enough not to be blown down, the lava kept blowing itself back till it had time to cool. And so, my dear child, there was no miracle at all in the matter; and the poor people of Catania had to thank not St. Agatha, and any interference of hers, but simply Him who can preserve, just as He can destroy, by those laws of nature which are the breath of His mouth and the servants of His will.

But in many a case the lava does not stop. It rolls on and on over the downs and through the valleys, till it reaches the sea-shore, as it did in Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands this very year. And then it cools, of course; but often not before it has killed the fish by its sulphurous gases and heat, perhaps for miles around. And there is good reason to believe that the fossil fish which we so often find in rocks, perfect in every bone, lying sometimes in heaps, and twisted (as I have seen them) as if they had died suddenly and violently, were killed in this very way, either by heat from lava streams, or else by the bursting up of gases poisoning the water, in earthquakes and eruptions in the bottom of the sea. I could tell you many stories of fish being killed in thousands by earthquakes and volcanos during the last few years. But we have not time to tell about everything.

And now you will ask me, with more astonishment than ever, what possible use can there be in these destroying streams of fire? And certainly, if you had ever seen a lava stream even when cool, and looked down, as I have done, at the great river of rough black blocks streaming away far and wide over the land, you would think it the most hideous and the most useless thing you ever saw. And yet, my dear child, there is One who told men to judge not according to the appearance, but to judge righteous judgment. He said that about matters spiritual and human: but it is quite as true about matters natural, which also are His work, and all obey His will.

Now if you had seen, as I have seen, close round the edges of these lava streams, and sometimes actually upon them, or upon the great bed of dust and ashes which have been hurled far and wide out of ancient volcanos, happy homesteads, rich crops, hemp and flax, and wheat, tobacco, lucerne, roots, and vineyards laden with white and purple grapes, you would have begun to suspect that the lava streams were not, after all, such very bad neighbours. And when I tell you that volcanic soils (as they are called), that is, soil which has at first been lava or ashes, are generally the richest soils in the world—that, for instance (as some one told me the other day), there is soil in the beautiful island of Madeira so thin that you cannot dig more than two or three inches down without coming to the solid rock of lava, or what is harder even, obsidian (which is the black glass which volcanos sometimes make, and which the old Mexicans used to chip into swords and arrows, because they had no steel)—and that this soil, thin as it is, is yet so fertile, that in it used to be grown the grapes of which the famous Madeira wine was made—when you remember this, and when you remember, too, the Lothians of Scotland (about which I shall have to say a little to you just now), then you will perhaps agree with me, that Lady Why has not been so very wrong in setting Madam How to pour out lava and ashes upon the surface of the earth.

For see—down below, under the roots of the mountains, Madam How works continually like a chemist in his laboratory, melting together all the rocks, which are the bones and leavings of the old worlds. If they stayed down below there, they would be of no use; while they will be of use up here in the open air. For, year by year—by the washing of rain and rivers, and also, I am sorry to say, by the ignorant and foolish waste of mankind—thousands and millions of tons of good stuff are running into the sea every year, which would, if it could be kept on land, make food for men and animals, plants and trees. So, in order to supply the continual waste of this upper world, Madam How is continually melting up the under world, and pouring it out of the volcanos like manure, to renew the face of the earth. In these lava rocks and ashes which she sends up there are certain substances, without which men cannot live—without which a stalk of corn or grass cannot grow. Without potash, without magnesia, both of which are in your veins and mine—without silicates (as they are called), which give flint to the stems of corn and of grass, and so make them stiff and hard, and able to stand upright—and very probably without the carbonic acid gas, which comes out of the volcanos, and is taken up by the leaves of plants, and turned by Madam How's cookery into solid wood—without all these things, and I suspect without a great many more things which come out of volcanos—I do not see how this beautiful green world could get on at all.

Of course, when the lava first cools on the surface of the ground it is hard enough, and therefore barren enough. But Madam How sets to work upon it at once, with that delicate little water-spade of hers, which we call rain, and with that alone, century after century, and age after age, she digs the lava stream down, atom by atom, and silts it over the country round in rich manure. So that if Madam How has been a rough and hasty workwoman in pumping her treasures up out of her mine with her great steam-pumps, she shows herself delicate and tender and kindly enough in giving them away afterwards.

Nay, even the fine dust which is sometimes blown out of volcanos is useful to countries far away. So light it is, that it rises into the sky and is wafted by the wind across the seas. So, in the year 1783, ashes from the Skaptar Jokull, in Iceland, were carried over the north of Scotland, and even into Holland, hundreds of miles to the south.

So, again, when in the year 1812 the volcano of St. Vincent, in the West India Islands, poured out torrents of lava, after mighty earthquakes which shook all that part of the world, a strange thing happened (about which I have often heard from those who saw it) in the island of Barbados, several hundred miles away. For when the sun rose in the morning (it was a Sunday morning), the sky remained more dark than any night, and all the poor negroes crowded terrified out of their houses into the streets, fancying the end of the world was come. But a learned man who was there, finding that, though the sun was risen, it was still pitchy dark, opened his window, and found that it was stuck fast by something on the ledge outside, and, when he thrust it open, found the ledge covered deep in soft red dust; and he instantly said, like a wise man as he was, "The volcano of St. Vincent must have broken out, and these are the ashes from it." Then he ran down stairs and quieted the poor negroes, telling them not to be afraid, for the end of the world was not coming just yet. But still the dust went on falling till the whole island, I am told, was covered an inch thick; and the same thing happened in the other islands round. People thought—and they had reason to think from what had often happened elsewhere—that though the dust might hurt the crops for that year, it would make them richer in years to come, because it would act as manure upon the soil; and so it did after a few years; but it did terrible damage at the time, breaking off the boughs of trees and covering up the crops; and in St. Vincent itself whole estates were ruined. It was a frightful day, but I know well that behind that How there was a Why for its happening, and happening too, about that very time, which all who know the history of negro slavery in the West Indies can guess for themselves, and confess, I hope, that in this case, as in all others, when Lady Why seems most severe she is often most just and kind.

Ah! my dear child, that I could go on talking to you of this for hours and days! But I have time now only to teach you the alphabet of these matters—and, indeed, I know little more than the alphabet myself; but if the very letters of Madam How's book, and the mere A, B, AB, of it, which I am trying to teach you, are so wonderful and so beautiful, what must its sentences be and its chapters? And what must the whole book be like? But that last none can read save He who wrote it before the worlds were made.

But now I see you want to ask a question. Let us have it out. I would sooner answer one question of yours than tell you ten things without your asking.

Is there potash and magnesia and silicates in the soil here? And if there is, where did they come from? For there are no volcanos in England.

Yes. There are such things in the soil; and little enough of them, as the farmers here know too well. For we here, in Windsor Forest, are on the very poorest and almost the newest soil in England; and when Madam How had used up all her good materials in making the rest of the island, she carted away her dry rubbish and shot it down here for us to make the best of; and I do not think that we and our forefathers have done so very ill with it. But where the rich part, or staple, of our soils came from first it would be very difficult to say, so often has Madam How made, and unmade, and re-made England, and sifted her materials afresh every time. But if you go to the Lowlands of Scotland, you may soon see where the staple of the soil came from there, and that I was right in saying that there were atoms of lava in every Scotch boy's broth. Not that there were ever (as far as I know) volcanos in Scotland or in England. Madam How has more than one string to her bow, or two strings either; so when she pours out her lavas, she does not always pour them out in the open air. Sometimes she pours them out at the bottom of the sea, as she did in the north of Ireland and the south-west of Scotland, when she made the Giant's Causeway, and Fingal's Cave in Staffa too, at the bottom of the old chalk ocean, ages and ages since. Sometimes she squirts them out between the layers of rock, or into cracks which the earthquakes have made, in what are called trap dykes, of which there are plenty to be seen in Scotland, and in Wales likewise. And then she lifts the earth up from the bottom of the sea, and sets the rain to wash away all the soft rocks, till the hard lava stands out in great hills upon the surface of the ground. Then the rain begins eating away those lava-hills likewise, and manuring the earth with them; and wherever those lava-hills stand up, whether great or small, there is pretty sure to be rich land around them. If you look at the Geological Map of England and Ireland, and the red spots upon it, which will show you where those old lavas are, you will see how much of them there is in England, at the Lizard Point in Cornwall, and how much more in Scotland and the north of Ireland. In South Devon, in Shropshire—with its beautiful Wrekin, and Caradoc, and Lawley—in Wales, round Snowdon (where some of the soil is very rich), and, above all, in the Lowlands of Scotland, you see these red marks, showing the old lavas, which are always fertile, except the poor old granite, which is of little use save to cut into building stone, because it is too full of quartz—that is, flint.

Think of this the next time you go through Scotland in the railway, especially when you get near Edinburgh. As you run through the Lothians, with their noble crops of corn, and roots, and grasses—and their great homesteads, each with its engine chimney, which makes steam do the work of men—you will see rising out of the plain, hills of dark rock, sometimes in single knobs, like Berwick Law or Stirling Crag—sometimes in noble ranges, like Arthur's Seat, or the Sidlaws, or the Ochils. Think what these black bare lumps of whinstone are, and what they do. Remember they are mines—not gold mines, but something richer still—food mines, which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages and ages since, as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and lifted them up, and pared them away with her ice-plough and her rain-spade, and spread the stuff of them over the wide carses round, to make in that bleak northern climate, which once carried nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed a great people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the ablest little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the Greeks who fought at Salamis.

Of those Greeks you have read, or ought to read, in Mr. Cox's Tales of the Persian War. Some day you will read of them in their own books, written in their grand old tongue. Remember that Lady Why made them, as she has made the Scotch, by first preparing a country for them, which would call out all their courage and their skill; and then by giving them the courage and the skill to make use of the land where she had put them.

And now think what a wonderful fairy tale you might write for yourself—and every word of it true—of the adventures of one atom of Potash or some other Salt, no bigger than a needle's point, in such a lava stream as I have been telling of. How it has run round and round, and will run round age after age, in an endless chain of change. How it began by being molten fire underground, how then it became part of a hard cold rock, lifted up into a cliff, beaten upon by rain and storm, and washed down into the soil of the plain, till, perhaps, the little atom of mineral met with the rootlet of some great tree, and was taken up into its sap in spring, through tiny veins, and hardened the next year into a piece of solid wood. And then how that tree was cut down, and its logs, it may be, burnt upon the hearth, till the little atom of mineral lay among the wood-ashes, and was shovelled out and thrown upon the field and washed into the soil again, and taken up by the roots of a clover plant, and became an atom of vegetable matter once more. And then how, perhaps, a rabbit came by, and ate the clover, and the grain of mineral became part of the rabbit; and then how a hawk killed that rabbit, and ate it, and so the grain became part of the hawk; and how the farmer shot the hawk, and it fell perchance into a stream, and was carried down into the sea; and when its body decayed, the little grain sank through the water, and was mingled with the mud at the bottom of the sea. But do its wanderings stop there? Not so, my child. Nothing upon this earth, as I told you once before, continues in one stay. That grain of mineral might stay at the bottom of the sea a thousand or ten thousand years, and yet the time would come when Madam How would set to work on it again. Slowly, perhaps, she would sink that mud so deep, and cover it up with so many fresh beds of mud, or sand, or lime, that under the heavy weight, and perhaps, too, under the heat of the inside of the earth, that Mud would slowly change to hard Slate Rock; and ages after, it may be, Madam How might melt that Slate Rock once more, and blast it out; and then through the mouth of a volcano the little grain of mineral might rise into the open air again to make fresh soil, as it had done thousands of years before. For Madam How can manufacture many different things out of the same materials. She may have so wrought with that grain of mineral, that she may have formed it into part of a precious stone, and men may dig it out of the rock, or pick it up in the river-bed, and polish it, and set it, and wear it. Think of that—that in the jewels which your mother or your sisters wear, or in your father's signet ring, there may be atoms which were part of a live plant, or a live animal, millions of years ago, and may be parts of a live plant or a live animal millions of years hence.

Think over again, and learn by heart, the links of this endless chain of change: Fire turned into Stone—Stone into Soil—Soil into Plant—Plant into Animal—Animal into Soil—Soil into Stone—Stone into Fire again—and then Fire into Stone again, and the old thing run round once more.

So it is, and so it must be. For all things which are born in Time must change in Time, and die in Time, till that Last Day of this our little earth, in which,

"Like to the baseless fabric of a vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all things which inherit, shall dissolve, And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind."

So all things change and die, and so your body too must change and die—but not yourself. Madam How made your body; and she must unmake it again, as she unmakes all her works in Time and Space; but you, child, your Soul, and Life, and Self, she did not make; and over you she has no power. For you were not, like your body, created in Time and Space; and you will endure though Time and Space should be no more: because you are the child of the Living God, who gives to each thing its own body, and can give you another body, even as seems good to Him.



CHAPTER V—THE ICE-PLOUGH

You want to know why I am so fond of that little bit of limestone, no bigger than my hand, which lies upon the shelf; why I ponder over it so often, and show it to all sensible people who come to see me?

I do so, not only for the sake of the person who gave it to me, but because there is written on it a letter out of Madam How's alphabet, which has taken wise men many a year to decipher. I could not decipher that letter when first I saw the stone. More shame for me, for I had seen it often before, and understood it well enough, in many another page of Madam How's great book. Take the stone, and see if you can find out anything strange about it.

Well, it is only a bit of marble as big as my hand, that looks as if it had been, and really has been, broken off by a hammer. But when you look again, you see there is a smooth scraped part on one edge, that seems to have been rubbed against a stone.

Now look at that rubbed part, and tell me how it was done.

You have seen men often polish one stone on another, or scour floors with a Bath brick, and you will guess at first that this was polished so: but if it had been, then the rubbed place would have been flat: but if you put your fingers over it, you will find that it is not flat. It is rolled, fluted, channelled, so that the thing or things which rubbed it must have been somewhat round. And it is covered, too, with very fine and smooth scratches or grooves, all running over the whole in the same line. Now what could have done that?

Of course a man could have done it, if he had taken a large round stone in his hand, and worked the large channellings with that, and then had taken fine sand and gravel upon the points of his fingers, and worked the small scratches with that. But this stone came from a place where man had, perhaps, never stood before,—ay, which, perhaps, had never seen the light of day before since the world was made; and as I happen to know that no man made the marks upon that stone, we must set to work and think again for some tool of Madam How's which may have made them.

And now I think you must give up guessing, and I must tell you the answer to the riddle. Those marks were made by a hand which is strong and yet gentle, tough and yet yielding, like the hand of a man; a hand which handles and uses in a grip stronger than a giant's its own carving tools, from the great boulder stone as large as this whole room to the finest grain of sand. And that is ICE.

That piece of stone came from the side of the Rosenlaui glacier in Switzerland, and it was polished by the glacier ice. The glacier melted and shrank this last hot summer farther back than it had done for many years, and left bare sheets of rock, which it had been scraping at for ages, with all the marks fresh upon them. And that bit was broken off and brought to me, who never saw a glacier myself, to show me how the marks which the ice makes in Switzerland are exactly the same as those which the ice has made in Snowdon and in the Highlands, and many another place where I have traced them, and written a little, too, about them in years gone by. And so I treasure this, as a sign that Madam How's ways do not change nor her laws become broken; that, as that great philosopher Sir Charles Lyell will tell you, when you read his books, Madam How is making and unmaking the surface of the earth now, by exactly the same means as she was making and unmaking ages and ages since; and that what is going on slowly and surely in the Alps in Switzerland was going on once here where we stand.

It is very difficult, I know, for a little boy like you to understand how ice, and much more how soft snow, should have such strength that it can grind this little stone, much more such strength as to grind whole mountains into plains. You have never seen ice and snow do harm. You cannot even recollect the Crimean Winter, as it was called then; and well for you you cannot, considering all the misery it brought at home and abroad. You cannot, I say, recollect the Crimean Winter, when the Thames was frozen over above the bridges, and the ice piled in little bergs ten to fifteen feet high, which lay, some of them, stranded on the shores, about London itself, and did not melt, if I recollect, until the end of May. You never stood, as I stood, in the great winter of 1837-8 on Battersea Bridge, to see the ice break up with the tide, and saw the great slabs and blocks leaping and piling upon each other's backs, and felt the bridge tremble with their shocks, and listened to their horrible grind and roar, till one got some little picture in one's mind of what must be the breaking up of an ice-floe in the Arctic regions, and what must be the danger of a ship nipped in the ice and lifted up on high, like those in the pictures of Arctic voyages which you are so fond of looking through. You cannot recollect how that winter even in our little Blackwater Brook the alder stems were all peeled white, and scarred, as if they had been gnawed by hares and deer, simply by the rushing and scraping of the ice,—a sight which gave me again a little picture of the destruction which the ice makes of quays, and stages, and houses along the shore upon the coasts of North America, when suddenly setting in with wind and tide, it jams and piles up high inland, as you may read for yourself some day in a delightful book called Frost and Fire. You recollect none of these things. Ice and snow are to you mere playthings; and you long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make your stomach ache. And I dare say you have said, like many another boy, on a bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it would be always winter!" You little knew for what you asked. You little thought what the earth would soon be like, if it were always winter,—if one sheet of ice on the pond glued itself on to the bottom of the last sheet, till the whole pond was a solid mass,—if one snow-fall lay upon the top of another snow-fall till the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields, tearing the trees up by their roots, burying gradually house, church, and village, and making this place for a few thousand years what it was many thousand years ago. Good-bye then, after a very few winters, to bees, and butterflies, and singing-birds, and flowers; and good-bye to all vegetables, and fruit, and bread; good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes. You would have, if you were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish and seals, if any came near enough to be caught. You would have to live in a word, if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic regions, and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times when it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and Finchampstead. Oh no, my child: thank Heaven that it is not always winter; and remember that winter ice and snow, though it is a very good tool with which to make the land, must leave the land year by year if that land is to be fit to live in.

I said that if the snow piled high enough upon the moor, it would come down the glen in a few years through Coombs's Wood; and I said then you would have a small glacier here—such a glacier (to compare small things with great) as now comes down so many valleys in the Alps, or has come down all the valleys of Greenland and Spitzbergen till they reach the sea, and there end as cliffs of ice, from which great icebergs snap off continually, and fall and float away, wandering southward into the Atlantic for many a hundred miles. You have seen drawings of such glaciers in Captain Cook's Voyages; and you may see photographs of Swiss glaciers in any good London print-shop; and therefore you have seen almost as much about them as I have seen, and may judge for yourself how you would like to live where it is always winter.

Now you must not ask me to tell you what a glacier is like, for I have never seen one; at least, those which I have seen were more than fifty miles away, looking like white clouds hanging on the gray mountain sides. And it would be an impertinence—that means a meddling with things which I have no business—to picture to you glaciers which have been pictured so well and often by gentlemen who escape every year from their hard work in town to find among the glaciers of the Alps health and refreshment, and sound knowledge, and that most wholesome and strengthening of all medicines, toil.

So you must read of them in such books as Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, and Mr. Willes's Wanderings in the High Alps, and Professor Tyndall's different works; or you must look at them (as I just now said) in photographs or in pictures. But when you do that, or when you see a glacier for yourself, you must bear in mind what a glacier means—that it is a river of ice, fed by a lake of snow. The lake from which it springs is the eternal snow-field which stretches for miles and miles along the mountain tops, fed continually by fresh snow-storms falling from the sky. That snow slides off into the valleys hour by hour, and as it rushes down is ground and pounded, and thawed and frozen again into a sticky paste of ice, which flows slowly but surely till it reaches the warm valley at the mountain foot, and there melts bit by bit. The long black lines which you see winding along the white and green ice of the glacier are the stones which have fallen from the cliffs above. They will be dropped at the end of the glacier, and mixed with silt and sand and other stones which have come down inside the glacier itself, and piled up in the field in great mounds, which are called moraines, such as you may see and walk on in Scotland many a time, though you might never guess what they are.

The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, you must remember, all foul and milky with the finest mud; and that mud is the grinding of the rocks over which the glacier has been crawling down, and scraping them as it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles and with sand. And this is the alphabet, which, if you learn by heart, you will learn to understand how Madam How uses her great ice-plough to plough down her old mountains, and spread the stuff of them about the valleys to make rich straths of fertile soil. Nay, so immensely strong, because immensely heavy, is the share of this her great ice-plough, that some will tell you (and it is not for me to say that they are wrong) that with it she has ploughed out all the mountain lakes in Europe and in North America; that such lakes, for instance, as Ullswater or Windermere have been scooped clean out of the solid rock by ice which came down these glaciers in old times. And be sure of this, that next to Madam How's steam-pump and her rain-spade, her great ice-plough has had, and has still, the most to do with making the ground on which we live.

Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here? No, I do not. There have been glaciers in Scotland in plenty. And if any Scotch boy shall read this book, it will tell him presently how to find the marks of them far and wide over his native land. But as you, my child, care most about this country in which you live, I will show you in any gravel-pit, or hollow lane upon the moor, the marks, not of a glacier, which is an ice- river, but of a whole sea of ice.

Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look carefully at what we see there. The lower part of the pit of course is a solid rock of sand. On the top of that is a cap of gravel, five, six, ten feet thick. Now the sand was laid down there by water at the bottom of an old sea; and therefore the top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as the sands at Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does not. See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits, filled up with gravel. And see, too, how over some of the gravel you get sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand again, till you cannot tell where one fairly begins and the other ends. Why, here are little dots of gravel, six or eight feet down, in what looks the solid sand rock, yet the sand must have been opened somehow to put the gravel in.

You say you have seen that before. You have seen the same curious twisting of the gravel and sand into each other on the top of Farley Hill, and in the new cutting on Minley Hill; and, best of all, in the railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where upon the top the white sand and gravel is arranged in red and brown waves, and festoons, and curlicues, almost like Prince of Wales's feathers. Yes, that last is a beautiful section of ice-work; so beautiful, that I hope to have it photographed some day.

Now, how did ice do this?

Well, I was many a year before I found out that, and I dare say I never should have found it out for myself. A gentleman named Trimmer, who, alas! is now dead, was, I believe, the first to find it out. He knew that along the coast of Labrador, and other cold parts of North America, and on the shores, too, of the great river St. Lawrence, the stranded icebergs, and the ice-foot, as it is called, which is continually forming along the freezing shores, grub and plough every tide into the mud and sand, and shove up before them, like a ploughshare, heaps of dirt; and that, too, the ice itself is full of dirt, of sand and stones, which it may have brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this ploughshare of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is continually being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place where the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the ice. So, what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the mud, and the dirt which it leaves behind when it melts, the stones, and sand, and mud upon the shore are jumbled up into curious curved and twisted layers, exactly like those which Mr. Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits. And when I first read about that, I said, "And exactly like what I have been seeing in every gravel-pit round here, and trying to guess how they could have been made by currents of water, and yet never could make any guess which would do." But after that it was all explained to me; and I said, "Honour to the man who has let Madam How teach him what she had been trying to teach me for fifteen years, while I was too stupid to learn it. Now I am certain, as certain as I can be of any earthly thing, that the whole of these Windsor Forest Flats were ages ago ploughed and harrowed over and over again, by ice-floes and icebergs drifting and stranding in a shallow sea."

And if you say, my dear child, as some people will say, that it is like building a large house upon a single brick to be sure that there was an iceberg sea here, just because I see a few curlicues in the gravel and sand—then I must tell you that there are sometimes—not often, but sometimes—pages in Madam How's book in which one single letter tells you as much as a whole chapter; in which if you find one little fact, and know what it really means, it makes you certain that a thousand other great facts have happened. You may be astonished: but you cannot deny your own eyes, and your own common sense. You feel like Robinson Crusoe when, walking along the shore of his desert island, he saw for the first time the print of a man's foot in the sand. How it could have got there without a miracle he could not dream. But there it was. One footprint was as good as the footprints of a whole army would have been. A man had been there; and more men might come. And in fear of the savages—and if you have read Robinson Crusoe you know how just his fears were—he went home trembling and loaded his muskets, and barricaded his cave, and passed sleepless nights watching for the savages who might come, and who came after all.

And so there are certain footprints in geology which there is no mistaking; and the prints of the ice-plough are among them.

For instance:—When they were trenching the new plantation close to Wellington College station, the men turned up out of the ground a great many Sarsden stones; that is, pieces of hard sugary sand, such as Stonehenge is made of. And when I saw these I said, "I suspect these were brought here by icebergs:" but I was not sure, and waited. As the men dug on, they dug up a great many large flints, with bottle-green coats. "Now," I said, "I am sure. For I know where these flints must have come from." And for reasons which would be too long to tell you here, I said, "Some time or other, icebergs have been floating northward from the Hog's Back over Aldershot and Farnborough, and have been trying to get into the Vale of Thames by the slope at Wellington College station; and they have stranded, and dropped these flints." And I am so sure of that, that if I found myself out wrong after all I should be at my wit's end; for I should know that I was wrong about a hundred things besides.

Or again, if you ever go up Deeside in Scotland, towards Balmoral, and turn up Glen Muick, towards Alt-na-guisach, of which you may see a picture in the Queen's last book, you will observe standing on your right hand, just above Birk Hall, three pretty rounded knolls, which they call the Coile Hills. You may easily know them by their being covered with beautiful green grass instead of heather. That is because they are made of serpentine or volcanic rock, which (as you have seen) often cuts into beautiful red and green marble; and which also carries a very rich soil because it is full of magnesia. If you go up those hills, you get a glorious view—the mountains sweeping round you where you stand, up to the top of Lochnagar, with its bleak walls a thousand feet perpendicular, and gullies into which the sun never shines, and round to the dark fir forests of the Ballochbuie. That is the arc of the bow; and the cord of the bow is the silver Dee, more than a thousand feet below you; and in the centre of the cord, where the arrow would be fitted in, stands Balmoral, with its Castle, and its Gardens, and its Park, and pleasant cottages and homesteads all around. And when you have looked at the beautiful amphitheatre of forest at your feet, and looked too at the great mountains to the westward, and Benaun, and Benna-buird and Benna- muicdhui, with their bright patches of eternal snow, I should advise you to look at the rock on which you stand, and see what you see there. And you will see that on the side of the Coiles towards Lochnagar, and between the knolls of them, are scattered streams, as it were, of great round boulder stones—which are not serpentine, but granite from the top of Lochnagar, five miles away. And you will see that the knolls of serpentine rock, or at least their backs and shoulders towards Lochnagar, are all smoothed and polished till they are as round as the backs of sheep, "roches moutonnees," as the French call ice-polished rocks; and then, if you understand what that means, you will say, as I said, "I am perfectly certain that this great basin between me and Lochnagar, which is now 3000 feet deep of empty air was once filled up with ice to the height of the hills on which I stand—about 1700 feet high—and that that ice ran over into Glen Muick, between these pretty knolls, and covered the ground where Birk Hall now stands."

And more:—When you see growing on those knolls of serpentine a few pretty little Alpine plants, which have no business down there so low, you will have a fair right to say, as I said, "The seeds of these plants were brought by the ice ages and ages since from off the mountain range of Lochnagar, and left here, nestling among the rocks, to found a fresh colony, far from their old mountain home."

If I could take you with me up to Scotland,—take you, for instance, along the Tay, up the pass of Dunkeld, or up Strathmore towards Aberdeen, or up the Dee towards Braemar,—I could show you signs, which cannot be mistaken, of the time when Scotland was, just like Spitzbergen or like Greenland now, covered in one vast sheet of snow and ice from year's end to year's end; when glaciers were ploughing out its valleys, icebergs were breaking off the icy cliffs and floating out to sea; when not a bird, perhaps, was to be seen save sea-fowl, not a plant upon the rocks but a few lichens, and Alpine saxifrages, and such like—desolation and cold and lifeless everywhere. That ice-time went on for ages and for ages; and yet it did not go on in vain. Through it Madam How was ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich farms which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into Sutherlandshire. I could show you everywhere the green banks and knolls of earth, which Scotch people call "kames" and "tomans"—perhaps brought down by ancient glaciers, or dropped by ancient icebergs—now so smooth and green through summer and through winter, among the wild heath and the rough peat-moss, that the old Scots fancied, and I dare say Scotch children fancy still, fairies dwelt inside. If you laid your ear against the mounds, you might hear the fairy music, sweet and faint, beneath the ground. If you watched the mound at night, you might see the fairies dancing the turf short and smooth, or riding out on fairy horses, with green silk clothes and jingling bells. But if you fell asleep upon the mounds, the fairy queen came out and carried you for seven years into Fairyland, till you awoke again in the same place, to find all changed around you, and yourself grown thin and old.

These are all dreams and fancies—untrue, not because they are too strange and wonderful, but because they are not strange and wonderful enough: for more wonderful sure than any fairy tale it is, that Madam How should make a rich and pleasant land by the brute force of ice.

And were there any men and women in that old age of ice? That is a long story, and a dark one too; we will talk of it next time.



CHAPTER VI—THE TRUE FAIRY TALE

You asked if there were men in England when the country was covered with ice and snow. Look at this, and judge for yourself.

What is it? a piece of old mortar? Yes. But mortar which was made Madam How herself, and not by any man. And what is in it? A piece of flint and some bits of bone. But look at that piece of flint. It is narrow, thin, sharp-edged: quite different in shape from any bit of flint which you or I ever saw among the hundreds of thousands of broken bits of gravel which we tread on here all day long; and here are some more bits like it, which came from the same place—all very much the same shape, like rough knives or razor blades; and here is a core of flint, the remaining part of a large flint, from which, as you may see, blades like those have been split off. Those flakes of flint, my child, were split off by men; even your young eyes ought to be able to see that. And here are other pieces of flint—pear-shaped, but flattened, sharp at one end and left rounded at the other, which look like spear-heads, or arrow-heads, or pointed axes, or pointed hatchets—even your young eyes can see that these must have been made by man. And they are, I may tell you, just like the tools of flint, or of obsidian, which is volcanic glass, and which savages use still where they have not iron. There is a great obsidian knife, you know, in a house in this very parish, which came from Mexico; and your eye can tell you how like it is to these flint ones. But these flint tools are very old. If you crack a fresh flint, you will see that its surface is gray, and somewhat rough, so that it sticks to your tongue. These tools are smooth and shiny: and the edges of some of them are a little rubbed from being washed about in gravel; while the iron in the gravel has stained them reddish, which it would take hundreds and perhaps thousands of years to do. There are little rough markings, too, upon some of them, which, if you look at through a magnifying glass, are iron, crystallised into the shape of little sea- weeds and trees—another sign that they are very very old. And what is more, near the place where these flint flakes come from there are no flints in the ground for hundreds of miles; so that men must have brought them there ages and ages since. And to tell you plainly, these are scrapers such as the Esquimaux in North America still use to scrape the flesh off bones, and to clean the insides of skins.

But did these people (savages perhaps) live when the country was icy cold? Look at the bits of bone. They have been split, you see, lengthways; that, I suppose, was to suck the marrow out of them, as savages do still. But to what animal do the bones belong? That is the question, and one which I could not have answered you, if wiser men than I am could not have told me.

They are the bones of reindeer—such reindeer as are now found only in Lapland and the half-frozen parts of North America, close to the Arctic circle, where they have six months day and six months night. You have read of Laplanders, and how they drive reindeer in their sledges, and live upon reindeer milk; and you have read of Esquimaux, who hunt seals and walrus, and live in houses of ice, lighted by lamps fed with the same blubber on which they feed themselves. I need not tell you about them.

Now comes the question—Whence did these flints and bones come? They came out of a cave in Dordogne, in the heart of sunny France,—far away to the south, where it is hotter every summer than it was here even this summer, from among woods of box and evergreen oak, and vineyards of rich red wine. In that warm land once lived savages, who hunted amid ice and snow the reindeer, and with the reindeer animals stranger still.

And now I will tell you a fairy tale: to make you understand it at all I must put it in the shape of a tale. I call it a fairy tale, because it is so strange; indeed I think I ought to call it the fairy tale of all fairy tales, for by the time we get to the end of it I think it will explain to you how our forefathers got to believe in fairies, and trolls, and elves, and scratlings, and all strange little people who were said to haunt the mountains and the caves.

Well, once upon a time, so long ago that no man can tell when, the land was so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and, what is more, between England and Norway, was firm dry land. The country then must have looked—at least we know it looked so in Norfolk—very like what our moors look like here. There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every plantation. There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there are in our woods now. There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in Larmer's and Heath pond; and white and yellow water-lilies, horn-wort, and pond-weeds, just as there are now in our ponds. There were wild horses, wild deer, and wild oxen, those last of an enormous size. There were little yellow roe-deer, which will not surprise you, for there are hundreds and thousands in Scotland to this day; and, as you know, they will thrive well enough in our woods now. There were beavers too: but that must not surprise you, for there were beavers in South Wales long after the Norman Conquest, and there are beavers still in the mountain glens of the south-east of France. There were honest little water-rats too, who I dare say sat up on their hind legs like monkeys, nibbling the water-lily pods, thousands of years ago, as they do in our ponds now. Well, so far we have come to nothing strange: but now begins the fairy tale. Mixed with all these animals, there wandered about great herds of elephants and rhinoceroses; not smooth-skinned, mind, but covered with hair and wool, like those which are still found sticking out of the everlasting ice cliffs, at the mouth of the Lena and other Siberian rivers, with the flesh, and skin, and hair so fresh upon them, that the wild wolves tear it off, and snarl and growl over the carcase of monsters who were frozen up thousands of years ago. And with them, stranger still, were great hippopotamuses; who came, perhaps, northward in summer time along the sea-shore and down the rivers, having spread hither all the way from Africa; for in those days, you must understand, Sicily, and Italy, and Malta—look at your map—were joined to the coast of Africa: and so it may be was the rock of Gibraltar itself; and over the sea where the Straits of Gibraltar now flow was firm dry land, over which hyaenas and leopards, elephants and rhinoceroses ranged into Spain; for their bones are found at this day in the Gibraltar caves. And this is the first chapter of my fairy tale.

Now while all this was going on, and perhaps before this began, the climate was getting colder year by year—we do not know how; and, what is more, the land was sinking; and it sank so deep that at last nothing was left out of the water but the tops of the mountains in Ireland, and Scotland, and Wales. It sank so deep that it left beds of shells belonging to the Arctic regions nearly two thousand feet high upon the mountain side. And so

"It grew wondrous cold, And ice mast-high came floating by, As green as emerald."

But there were no masts then to measure the icebergs by, nor any ship nor human being there. All we know is that the icebergs brought with them vast quantities of mud, which sank to the bottom, and covered up that pleasant old forest-land in what is called boulder-clay; clay full of bits of broken rock, and of blocks of stone so enormous, that nothing but an iceberg could have carried them. So all the animals were drowned or driven away, and nothing was left alive perhaps, except a few little hardy plants which clung about cracks and gullies in the mountain tops; and whose descendants live there still. That was a dreadful time; the worst, perhaps, of all the age of Ice; and so ends the second chapter of my fairy tale.

Now for my third chapter. "When things come to the worst," says the proverb, "they commonly mend;" and so did this poor frozen and drowned land of England and France and Germany, though it mended very slowly. The land began to rise out of the sea once more, and rose till it was perhaps as high as it had been at first, and hundreds of feet higher than it is now: but still it was very cold, covered, in Scotland at least, with one great sea of ice and glaciers descending down into the sea, as I said when I spoke to you about the Ice-Plough. But as the land rose, and grew warmer too, while it rose, the wild beasts who had been driven out by the great drowning came gradually back again. As the bottom of the old icy sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses, and weeds, and shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, oxen—sometimes the same species, sometimes slightly different ones—returned to France, and then to England (for there was no British Channel then to stop them); and with them came other strange animals, especially the great Irish elk, as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns sometimes ten feet across. A pair of those horns with the skull you have seen yourself, and can judge what a noble animal he must have been. Enormous bears came too, and hyaenas, and a tiger or lion (I cannot say which), as large as the largest Bengal tiger now to be seen in India.

And in those days—we cannot, of course, exactly say when—there came—first I suppose into the south and east of France, and then gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland—creatures without any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them, without horns or tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite; the weakest you would have thought of the beasts, and yet stronger than all the animals, because they were Men, with reasonable souls. Whence they came we cannot tell, nor why; perhaps from mere hunting after food, and love of wandering and being independent and alone. Perhaps they came into that icy land for fear of stronger and cleverer people than themselves; for we have no proof, my child, none at all, that they were the first men that trod this earth. But be that as it may, they came; and so cunning were these savage men, and so brave likewise, though they had no iron among them, only flint and sharpened bones, yet they contrived to kill and eat the mammoths, and the giant oxen, and the wild horses, and the reindeer, and to hold their own against the hyaenas, and tigers, and bears, simply because they had wits, and the dumb animals had none. And that is the strangest part to me of all my fairy tale. For what a man's wits are, and why he has them, and therefore is able to invent and to improve, while even the cleverest ape has none, and therefore can invent and improve nothing, and therefore cannot better himself, but must remain from father to son, and father to son again, a stupid, pitiful, ridiculous ape, while men can go on civilising themselves, and growing richer and more comfortable, wiser and happier, year by year—how that comes to pass, I say, is to me a wonder and a prodigy and a miracle, stranger than all the most fantastic marvels you ever read in fairy tales.

You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried in many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England; but you will find none here, for the gravel here was made (I am told) at the beginning of the ice-time, before the north of England sunk into the sea, and therefore long, long before men came into this land. But most of their remains are found in caves which water has eaten out of the limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay. In it, and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate, and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their flint-weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with round stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime. These are in the water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped from the roof above and hardened into stone. Of these caves and their beautiful wonders I must tell you another day. We must keep now to our fairy tale. But in these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory—drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex—and one, which was found in France, of the great mammoth himself, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane. So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember that. You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat scratching on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious human nature as you—that he was the kinsman of every painter and sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works of God.

Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left behind upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there "kjokken-moddings"—"kitchen-middens" as they would say in Scotland, "kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South—and a very good name for them that is; for they are made up of the shells of oysters, cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other shore-shells besides, on which those poor creatures fed; and mingled with them are broken bones of beasts, and fishes, and birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling stones; and here and there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals in some rough way. And that is nearly all we know about them; but this we know from the size of certain of the shells, and from other reasons which you would not understand, that these mounds were made an enormous time ago, when the water of the Baltic Sea was far more salt than it is now.

But what has all this to do with my fairy tale? This:—

Suppose that these people, after all, had been fairies?

I am in earnest. Of course, I do not mean that these folk could make themselves invisible, or that they had any supernatural powers—any more, at least, than you and I have—or that they were anything but savages; but this I do think, that out of old stories of these savages grew up the stories of fairies, elves, and trolls, and scratlings, and cluricaunes, and ogres, of which you have read so many.

When stronger and bolder people, like the Irish, and the Highlanders of Scotland, and the Gauls of France, came northward with their bronze and iron weapons; and still more, when our own forefathers, the Germans and the Norsemen, came, these poor little savages with their flint arrows and axes, were no match for them, and had to run away northward, or to be all killed out; for people were fierce and cruel in those old times, and looked on every one of a different race from themselves as a natural enemy. They had not learnt—alas! too many have not learned it yet—that all men are brothers for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. So these poor savages were driven out, till none were left, save the little Lapps up in the north of Norway, where they live to this day.

But stories of them, and of how they dwelt in caves, and had strange customs, and used poisoned weapons, and how the elf-bolts (as their flint arrow-heads are still called) belonged to them, lingered on, and were told round the fire on winter nights and added to, and played with half in fun, till a hundred legends sprang up about them, which used once to be believed by grown-up folk, but which now only amuse children. And because some of these savages were very short, as the Lapps and Esquimaux are now, the story grew of their being so small that they could make themselves invisible; and because others of them were (but probably only a few) very tall and terrible, the story grew that there were giants in that old world, like that famous Gogmagog, whom Brutus and his Britons met (so old fables tell), when they landed first at Plymouth, and fought him, and threw him over the cliff. Ogres, too—of whom you read in fairy tales—I am afraid that there were such people once, even here in Europe; strong and terrible savages, who ate human beings. Of course, the legends and tales about them became ridiculous and exaggerated as they passed from mouth to mouth over the Christmas fire, in the days when no one could read or write. But that the tales began by being true any one may well believe who knows how many cannibal savages there are in the world even now. I think that, if ever there was an ogre in the world, he must have been very like a certain person who lived, or was buried, in a cave in the Neanderthal, between Elberfeld and Dusseldorf, on the Lower Rhine. The skull and bones which were found there (and which are very famous now among scientific men) belonged to a personage whom I should have been very sorry to meet, and still more to let you meet, in the wild forest; to a savage of enormous strength of limb (and I suppose of jaw) likewise

"like an ape, With forehead villainous low,"

who could have eaten you if he would; and (I fear) also would have eaten you if he could. Such savages may have lingered (I believe, from the old ballads and romances, that they did linger) for a long time in lonely forests and mountain caves, till they were all killed out by warriors who wore mail-armour and carried steel sword, and battle-axe, and lance.

But had these people any religion?

My dear child, we cannot know, and need not know. But we know this—that God beholds all the heathen. He fashions the hearts of them, and understandeth all their works. And we know also that He is just and good. These poor folks were, I doubt not, happy enough in their way; and we are bound to believe (for we have no proof against it), that most of them were honest and harmless enough likewise. Of course, ogres and cannibals, and cruel and brutal persons (if there were any among them), deserved punishment—and punishment, I do not doubt, they got. But, of course, again, none of them knew things which you know; but for that very reason they were not bound to do many things which you are bound to do. For those to whom little is given, of them shall little be required. What their religion was like, or whether they had any religion at all, we cannot tell. But this we can tell, that known unto God are all His works from the creation of the world; and that His mercy is over all His works, and He hateth nothing that He has made. These men and women, whatever they were, were God's work; and therefore we may comfort ourselves with the certainty that, whether or not they knew God, God knew them.

And so ends my fairy tale.

But is it not a wonderful tale? More wonderful, if you will think over it, than any story invented by man. But so it always is. "Truth," wise men tell us, "is stranger than fiction." Even a child like you will see that it must be so, if you will but recollect who makes fiction, and who makes facts.

Man makes fiction: he invents stories, pretty enough, fantastical enough. But out of what does he make them up? Out of a few things in this great world which he has seen, and heard, and felt, just as he makes up his dreams. But who makes truth? Who makes facts? Who, but God?

Then truth is as much larger than fiction, as God is greater than man; as much larger as the whole universe is larger than the little corner of it that any man, even the greatest poet or philosopher, can see; and as much grander, and as much more beautiful, and as much more strange. For one is the whole, and the other is one, a few tiny scraps of the whole. The one is the work of God; the other is the work of man. Be sure that no man can ever fancy anything strange, unexpected, and curious, without finding if he had eyes to see, a hundred things around his feet more strange, more unexpected, more curious, actually ready-made already by God. You are fond of fairy tales, because they are fanciful, and like your dreams. My dear child, as your eyes open to the true fairy tale which Madam How can tell you all day long, nursery stories will seem to you poor and dull. All those feelings in you which your nursery tales call out,—imagination, wonder, awe, pity, and I trust too, hope and love—will be called out, I believe, by the Tale of all Tales, the true "Marchen allen Marchen," so much more fully and strongly and purely, that you will feel that novels and story-books are scarcely worth your reading, as long as you can read the great green book, of which every bud is a letter, and every tree a page.

Wonder if you will. You cannot wonder too much. That you might wonder all your life long, God put you into this wondrous world, and gave you that faculty of wonder which he has not given to the brutes; which is at once the mother of sound science, and a pledge of immortality in a world more wondrous even than this. But wonder at the right thing, not at the wrong; at the real miracles and prodigies, not at the sham. Wonder not at the world of man. Waste not your admiration, interest, hope on it, its pretty toys, gay fashions, fine clothes, tawdry luxuries, silly amusements. Wonder at the works of God. You will not, perhaps, take my advice yet. The world of man looks so pretty, that you will needs have your peep at it, and stare into its shop windows; and if you can, go to a few of its stage plays, and dance at a few of its balls. Ah—well—After a wild dream comes an uneasy wakening; and after too many sweet things, comes a sick headache. And one morning you will awake, I trust and pray, from the world of man to the world of God, and wonder where wonder is due, and worship where worship is due. You will awake like a child who has been at a pantomime over night, staring at the "fairy halls," which are all paint and canvas; and the "dazzling splendours," which are gas and oil; and the "magic transformations," which are done with ropes and pulleys; and the "brilliant elves," who are poor little children out of the next foul alley; and the harlequin and clown, who through all their fun are thinking wearily over the old debts which they must pay, and the hungry mouths at home which they must feed: and so, having thought it all wondrously glorious, and quite a fairy land, slips tired and stupid into bed, and wakes next morning to see the pure light shining in through the delicate frost-lace on the window-pane, and looks out over fields of virgin snow, and watches the rosy dawn and cloudless blue, and the great sun rising to the music of cawing rooks and piping stares, and says, "This is the true wonder. This is the true glory. The theatre last night was the fairy land of man; but this is the fairy land of God."



CHAPTER VII—THE CHALK-CARTS

What do you want to know about next? More about the caves in which the old savages lived,—how they were made, and how the curious things inside them got there, and so forth.

Well, we will talk about that in good time: but now—What is that coming down the hill?

Oh, only some chalk-carts.

Only some chalk-carts? It seems to me that these chalk-carts are the very things we want; that if we follow them far enough—I do not mean with our feet along the public road, but with our thoughts along a road which, I am sorry to say, the public do not yet know much about—we shall come to a cave, and understand how a cave is made. Meanwhile, do not be in a hurry to say, "Only a chalk-cart," or only a mouse, or only a dead leaf. Chalk-carts, like mice, and dead leaves, and most other matters in the universe are very curious and odd things in the eyes of wise and reasonable people. Whenever I hear young men saying "only" this and "only" that, I begin to suspect them of belonging, not to the noble army of sages—much less to the most noble army of martyrs,—but to the ignoble army of noodles, who think nothing interesting or important but dinners, and balls, and races, and back-biting their neighbours; and I should be sorry to see you enlisting in that regiment when you grow up. But think—are not chalk-carts very odd and curious things? I think they are. To my mind, it is a curious question how men ever thought of inventing wheels; and, again, when they first thought of it. It is a curious question, too, how men ever found out that they could make horses work for them, and so began to tame them, instead of eating them, and a curious question (which I think we shall never get answered) when the first horse-tamer lived, and in what country. And a very curious, and, to me, a beautiful sight it is, to see those two noble horses obeying that little boy, whom they could kill with a single kick.

But, beside all this, there is a question, which ought to be a curious one to you (for I suspect you cannot answer it)—Why does the farmer take the trouble to send his cart and horses eight miles and more, to draw in chalk from Odiham chalk-pit?

Oh, he is going to put it on the land, of course. They are chalking the bit at the top of the next field, where the copse was grubbed.