A Cruise in the Cassiar 



and back on the broad melting bosom of the glacier 

 beyond the crevassed front, many streams were re- 

 joicing, gurgling, ringing, singing, in frictionless 

 channels worn down through the white disinte- 

 grated ice of the surface into the quick and living 

 blue, in which they flowed with a grace of motion and 

 flashing of light to be found only on the crystal hil- 

 locks and ravines of a glacier. 



Along the sides of the glacier we saw the mighty 

 flood grinding against the granite walls with tremen- 

 dous pressure, rounding outswelling bosses, and deep- 

 ening the retreating hollows into the forms they are 

 destined to have when, in the fullness of appointed 

 time, the huge ice tool shall be withdrawn by the sun. 

 Every feature glowed with intention, reflecting the 

 plans of God. Back a few miles from the front, the 

 glacier is now probably but little more than a thou- 

 sand feet deep ; but when we examine the records on 

 the walls, the rounded, grooved, striated, and polished 

 features so surely glacial, we learn that in the earlier 

 days of the ice age they were all over-swept, and that 

 this glacier has flowed at a height of from three to 

 four thousand feet above its present level, when it 

 was at least a mile deep. 



Standing here, with facts so fresh and telling and 

 held up so vividly before us, every seeing observer, 

 not to say geologist, must readily apprehend the earth- 

 sculpturing, landscape-making action of flowing ice. 

 And here, too, one learns that the world, though made, 

 is yet being made; that this is still the morning of 

 creation ; that mountains long conceived are now being 



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