THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 



Shawangunk Mountains, the Oneida conglomerate, 

 and the conglomerate on the tops of the Catskills. 



In our Northern States there are two classes of 

 rocks: the place rocks, and the wanderers, or drift 

 boulders. The boulders are in some ways the more 

 interesting; they have a story to tell which the place 

 rock has not; they have drifted about upon a sea of 

 change, slow and unwilling voyagers from the North 

 many tens of thousands of years ago; now they lie 

 here in the fields and on the hills, shipwrecked mar- 

 iners, in some cases hundreds of miles from home. 

 But usually they have been plucked from the neigh- 

 boring ledges or mountains, and shoved or trans- 

 ported to where they now lie. In nearly all cases the 

 sharp points and angles have been rubbed down, as 

 with most travelers, and they lie about the fields 

 like cattle ruminating upon the ground. 



"The shadow of a great rock in a weary land " is 

 pretty sure to be the shadow of a drift boulder. The 

 rock about which, and on which, we played as chil- 

 dren was doubtless a drift boulder; the rocks be- 

 neath which the woodchucks and the foxes burrow 

 are drift boulders; the rock under the spreading 

 maples where the picnickers eat their lunch is a 

 drift boulder; the rock that makes the deep pool in 

 the trout-stream of your boyhood is a drift boulder; 

 the rocks which you helped your father pry up from 

 the fields and haul to their place for the "rock bot- 

 tom" of the stone wall, in the old days on the farm, 

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