TIME AND CHANGE 



written over with the history of the passing of the 

 great ice plane. The surface exposed is ten or twelve 

 feet long, and four or five feet wide, and it is as 

 straight and smooth, and the scratches and grooves 

 are as sharp and distinct as if made yesterday. I 

 often take the college girls there who come to visit 

 me, to show them, as I tell them, where the old ice 

 gods left their signatures. The girls take turns in 

 stooping down and looking along the under surface 

 of the rock, and feeling it with their hands, and 

 marveling. They have read or heard about these 

 things, but the reading or hearing made little im- 

 pression upon their minds. When they see a con- 

 crete example, and feel it with their hands, they are 

 impressed. Then when I tell them that there is not 

 a shadow of a doubt but that the ice was at one time 

 two or three thousand feet thick above the place 

 where they now stand, and that it bore down upon 

 Julian's Rock with a weight of thousands of tons to 

 the square foot, that it filled all the Hudson River 

 Valley, and covered the landscape for thousands of 

 miles around them, riding over the tops of the Cat- 

 skills and of the Adirondacks, and wearing them 

 down and carrying fragments of rock torn from 

 them hundreds of miles to the south and southwest, 

 — when I have told them all of this, I have usually 

 given them a mouthful too big for them to masticate 

 or swallow. As a sort of abstract proposition con- 

 tained in books, or heard in the classroom, they do 



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