UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
and the hard dark, cross-bedded gray rock con- 
tinues to the top. 
In the higher peaks of the southern Catskills an- 
other kind of rock begins to appear before the sum- 
mit is reached —a conglomerate. The storm of 
dark snow has turned to a storm of white hail. As 
you go up, you seem to be climbing into a shower of 
quartz pebbles. Presently you begin to see here and 
there a pebble embedded in the rocks; then, as you 
go on, you see more of them, and still more; it is like 
the first sprinkle of rain that precedes the shower, 
till, long before you reach the summit, the regular 
downpour begins, the rocks become solid masses of 
pebbles embedded in a gray hard matrix; there are 
many hundreds of feet of them. On the top the soil 
is mainly sand and coarse gravel from the disinte- 
grated rock. 
The streams at the foot of the mountains abound 
in fragments of this pudding-stone or conglomerate, 
and in the hard, liberated quartz pebbles. These 
pebbles were rolled on an ancient sea-beach incalcu- 
lable ages ago, and now they are being rolled and 
worn again by the limpid waters of the Catskill 
trout-brooks. What varied fortune the whirligig of 
time brings to quartz pebbles as well as to men! 
Of course the Catskills were under water when 
this conglomerate was laid down upon them. The 
coal age was near at hand, and a conglomerate akin 
to this of the tops of the Catskills underlies the coal 
48 
