Off to the Hills 9 



low tangled bushes and open pasture-land beyond, 

 without forests to shield the bogs from the sweep of 

 winds. 



The hills are strewn with great boulders left here in 

 the Glacial Age, which rest, poised as monuments of 

 that mystical period. Especially interesting are the 

 dimpled erosions upon one boulder, which rests just 

 northeast of the lakelet, upon the ridges sloping east- 

 ward toward the sphagnous swamp. There are visible 

 deep scratches, hollows, arches and miniature pillars, 

 which the whirling eddies of the perilous waves have 

 eroded during the ages unknown. Higher on the 

 summit of the Hoosac rests another immense rock 

 known to students of geology as the ' ' Great Ver- 

 monter." It is said to have been brought from the 

 marble and granite heights of Vermont, imbedded in 

 the ice-drift. Through the melting of the glacial 

 sheet, one of the drifting bergs left this hero of the 

 ages as we may see it now, moored and balanced high 

 on old Hoosac' s brow. 



The geological surveys of northern Massachusetts, 

 by President Hitchcock of Amherst in 1838, early iden- 

 tified all of the low, round hills to be seen southward 

 from Aurora's Lake as the result of glacial action. 

 Mount Greylock's Brotherhood is a group of giant 

 glacial hills, as it were, and is the highest pile of 

 Taconic formation in this State. The erosions of the 

 great ice-sheet are plainly seen on the rocky summits 

 of these mountains, and only time and the decay of 

 the rock itself will do away with these scars of that 



