MID-SUMMER ALONG THE OLD CANAL. 83 



welled up and were snatched from oblivion by a ready 

 pencil, that the present article has to do. 



By street railway to Collett's Park, and then west- 

 ward by the gravel pit road, one reaches the canal at 

 one of its loveliest points near the southern edge of 

 Conover's Pond. At the gravel- pit I stopped awhile 

 and saw the puny power of a single man gradually 

 undoing what the mighty glaciers of the " Great Ice 

 Age " had done long centuries ago. Pebbles of man- 

 ifold kinds and sizes were being exposed once more 

 to the sunlight after being hidden from it for how 

 many thousand years? The iron pick wielded by the 

 workman pulled each from among its fellows and dis- 

 turbed the quiet which had reigned with them since 

 that former day when, after years of rolling, crush- 

 ing, onward movement, they had been dropped, by 

 the melting of a mighty bulk of ice, on the spot 

 where they had since lain. And now they must be 

 carried out to do duty for man ; to receive the crush- 

 ing effects of his wheels of iron, and, perhaps, by 

 them be crumbled into dust after having successfully 

 resisted the giant powers of the glaciers of long ago. 



Ah, the grandeur of the work which has been done 

 by nature's forces in the past for the benefit of the 

 races of the present! The sunlight of the old Car- 

 boniferous age did a work which now turns the wheels 

 of industry throughout the world and the glaciers 

 brought from afar the materials for our roadways and 

 deposited them where they would be needed, yea, at 

 the thresholds of our very doors. 



Beyond the gravel pit, where in June glistened the 

 waters of a broad, spreading pond, now gleamed in 



