UNDER THE APPLE-TREES 
were all drift boulders. How sod-bound many of 
them were, and how the old oxen used to settle into 
their bows with rigid muscles in pulling them from 
their beds! If you had looked on their under sides 
you would have seen how smoothed and worn most 
of them were. They had been hauled across the 
land by oxen of another kind long before yours 
were heard of. 
The rocks that give the eyebrows to the faces of 
the hills are place rocks — the cropping-out of the 
original strata. The place rock gives the contour to 
the landscape; it forms the ledges and cliffs; it thrusts 
a huge rocky fist up through the turf here and there, 
or it exposes a broad smooth surface where you may 
see the grooves and scratches of the great ice sheet, 
tens of thousands of years old. The marks of the old 
ice-plane upon the rocks weather out very slowly. 
When they are covered with a few inches of soil 
they are as distinct as those we saw in Alaska under 
the edges of the retreating glaciers. 
One day, on the crest of a hill above my Lodge on 
the home farm in the Catskills, I used my spade to 
remove five or six inches of soil from the upper layer 
of rock in order to prove to some doubting friends 
that a page of history was written here that they 
had never suspected. I quickly disclosed the lines 
and the grooves, nearly as sharp as if made but yes- 
terday, and as straight as if drawn by arule, running 
from northeast to southwest. Across the valley, a 
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