WITH THE WINTER BIRDS. 255 



feet above high tide. The waters had found for 

 themselves a new channel for the time, and the ice 

 held back the tide to a great extent. It was, in 

 short, the Ice Age come again. How glibly we talk 

 of the Glacial period ! how little we know of it ! 

 But to-day taught something. The world here had 

 taken a step backward, and showed how it was when 

 man first stood upon the glacial river's banks. There 

 were no walruses nor musk-ox, it is true, nor mas- 

 todon browsing on the sweet birch branches ; but 

 then in a sunny open spot, scarcely a mile away, 

 there was a seal. To-day the ice had little or no 

 mud or gravel held in its tight embrace, but I found 

 here and there a pebble or slight trace of sand, and 

 this was the key to the problem of whence came 

 all the wide gravelly area, with its huge boulders 

 and its deep deposits of clean, gritty sand. With 

 them are mingled bones of animals, extinct, or found 

 only in the Arctic regions ; and man, too, has left 

 unmistakable traces of himself. Even his bones are 

 not wanting in the great gravel deposits laid down 

 in other days, when winter was longer than summer, 

 when there was more storm than sunshine, more 

 snow than rain, when to all appearances we were 

 nearer the North Pole than now. 



Be it ever so exciting as we progress, the return 

 journey is painfully commonplace. Retracing my 

 steps, I gladly knocked at Overfield's cottage door, 

 and entered when I heard his gruff " Come." To 

 him I told my story of the day, and he grunted 

 dissent from every boastful statement. The river 



