THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 
great stone book of the geologic strata its history is 
written. Even if we do not know our geology, there 
is something in the face of a cliff and in the look of a 
granite boulder that gives us pause and draws us 
thitherward in our walk. We linger beneath the 
cliff, or muse and dream amid its ruins as amid the 
ruins of some earth temple; we pause beside the 
huge boulder, or rest upon it and survey the land- 
scape from its coign of vantage; we lay our hand 
upon it as upon some curious relic from a world that 
we know not of. The elemental, the primordial, the 
silence of ages, the hush and repose of a measureless 
antiquity look out upon us from the face of the 
rocks. ‘The menacing might of the globe” is in the 
cliffs and the crags; its ease and contentment are in 
the slumbering boulders. One might have a worse 
fate than to have his lot cast in a rockless country — 
a treeless country would be still worse: but how the 
emigrant from New England or New York to the 
prairie States or to the cotton States, must miss his 
paternal rocks and ledges! A prairie farm has no 
past, no history looks out of it, no battle of the ele- 
mental forces has been fought there, and only a very 
tame, bloodless battle of the human forces. 
A landscape without rocks lacks something. 
Without the outcropping ledge, the faces of the hills 
lack eyebrows; without a drift boulder here and 
there, the fields lack the rugged elemental touch. 
Next to the trees, rocks are points of interest in the 
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