582 GEOLOGY OF OLD HAMPSHIEE COUNTY, MASS. 



Orient cellar has dropped down and is covered with till, while the sands at 

 the Orient cellar drop by a sharp slope to those of the highest terrace of the 

 Hadley Lake. 



A. — At the first house in the west village of Pelham, about 320 feet 

 above the sea level, the last trace of the highest bench of the Amherst 

 basin (the Hadley Lake) disappeared, and through the village, eastward 

 into the notch, the coarse till made the surface to the point where the 

 Shutesbury road branches off, as has been described on page 581. 



B. — Here the till goes under sands and continues about horizontal or 

 rising slightly for a long distance eastward, so that the increased elevation 

 of the surface is to be referred wholly to the thickening of the overlying 

 sands. 



Beginning at the Shutesbmy road the sands are, for a distance, thin, 

 and contain here and there a large stone — the largest, 1 foot in diameter. 

 They then thicken to 70 feet (fig. 32), and hold this thickness past the 

 Orient House cellar. Where they begin to thicken — at the house west of 

 the Orient — clean-washed, dry, whitish sand appears in layers from 6 to 12 

 inches thick, dipping 10° W., alternating with layers of washed gravel 2 

 feet thick containing many pebbles up to 6 inches, and rarely one a foot, in 

 diameter. The sand layers are evenly stratified and show no finer struc- 

 ture. Sometimes a sand layer waves up and down, and the gravel layer 

 above thickens to fill the depression. A little farther east one layer of 

 fine, well-washed gravel — the pebbles averaging 1 inch — grades westward 

 into sand and eastward into 6-inch gravel. All along in front of the Orient 

 House the cutting was mostly in sand, showing most beautiful and con- 

 torted flow-and-plunge structm-e, the dip of the laminae being 20 to 30° E., 

 as if urged by a rapid current from the west. 



Much of the way, however, the whole is thrown into great confusion. 

 Layers of sand a foot thick, with fine false bedding, stand directly on their 

 heads or are variously twisted in the gravel, or the sand cuts off vertically 

 against the gravel, and vice versa. In one case a band of gravel 2 feet 

 wide was intruded into the sand like a dike; in another a mass of sand 8 

 feet wide occupied the same position in the gravel, as if the water had 

 worn a channel in the frozen gravel and filled it with its own sands. 



Leaving the road at the Orient House the ditch passed across the 

 flat field in front of the house, the beds growing finer in grain and the 

 disturbances gradually diminishing. 



