THE FRIENDLY ROCKS 
once becomes a wanderer, it is restless ever after, 
and stirs in its sleep. Heat and cold expand and 
contract it, and make it creep down an incline. 
Hitch your rock to a sunbeam, and come back in a 
hundred years, and see how much it has moved. I 
know a great platform of rock weighing hundreds of 
tons, and large enough to build a house upon, that 
has slid down the hill from the ledges above, and 
that is pushing a roll of turf before it as a boat pushes 
a wave, but stand there till you are gray, and you 
will see no motion; return in a century, and you will 
doubtless find that the great rock raft has pro- 
gressed a few inches. What a sense of leisure such 
things give us hurrying mortals! 
One of my favorite pastimes from boyhood up, 
when in my home country in the Catskills, has been 
to prowl about under the ledges of the dark gray 
shelving rocks that jut out fromthe sides of the hills 
and mountains, often forming a roof over one’s 
head many feet in extent, and now and then shelter- 
ing a cool, sweet spring, and more often sheltering 
the exquisite moss-covered nest of the phoebe-bird. 
These ledges appealed to the wild and adventurous 
in the boy. The primitive cave-dweller in me, which 
is barely skin-deep in most boys, found something 
congenial there; the air smelled good; it seemed 
fresher and more primitive than the outside air; it 
was the breath of the rocks and of the everlasting 
hills; the home feeling which I had amid such seenes 
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