THE OLD ICE-FLOOD 
transcends all our experience with ice and snow, or 
the experience of the race since the dawn of history, 
that only the scientific imagination and faith are 
equal to it. The belief in it rests on indubitable evi- 
dence, its record is written all over our landscape, 
but it requires, I say, the scientific imagination to 
put the facts together and make a continuous his- 
tory. 
Three or four hundred feet above my cabin, five 
or six hundred feet above tidewater, there is a bold 
rocky point upon which the old ice-sheet bore heav- 
ily. It has rubbed it down and flattened it as a 
hand passing over a knob of soft putty might do. 
The great hand in this case moved from the north- 
east and must have fairly made this rocky promin- 
ence groan with its weight. The surface, scratched 
and grooved and planed by the ice, has weathered 
away, leaving the rock quite rough; its general out- 
lines alone tell the tale of the battle with the ice. 
But on the east side a huge mass of rock, that had 
been planed and gouged by the glacier, was detached 
and toppled over, turning topsy-turvy before it had 
weathered, and it lies in such a position, upheld 
by two rock fragments, that its glaciated surface, 
though protected from the weather, is clearly visi- 
ble. You step down two or three feet between the 
two upholding rocks and are at the entrance of a 
little cave, and there before you, standing at an 
angle of thirty or forty degrees, is this rocky page 
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