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Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

by Charles Kingsley · English · Gutenberg #1697 · 410,921 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children

Author: Charles Kingsley


        
Release date: April 1, 1999 [eBook #1697]
                Most recently updated: December 31, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1697

Credits: Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY; OR, FIRST LESSONS IN EARTH LORE FOR CHILDREN ***






Transcribed from the 1889 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@coventry.ac.uk





MADAM HOW AND LADY WHY
or, FIRST LESSONS IN EARTH LORE FOR CHILDREN



DEDICATION


To my son Grenville Arthur, and to his school-fellows at Winton House
This little book is dedicated.




PREFACE


My dear boys,--When I was your age, there were no such children's books
as there are now.  Those which we had were few and dull, and the pictures
in them ugly and mean: while you have your choice of books without
number, clear, amusing, and pretty, as well as really instructive, on
subjects which were only talked of fifty years ago by a few learned men,
and very little understood even by them.  So if mere reading of books
would make wise men, you ought to grow up much wiser than us old fellows.
But mere reading of wise books will not make you wise men: you must use
for yourselves the tools with which books are made wise; and that is--your
eyes, and ears, and common sense.

Now, among those very stupid old-fashioned boys' books was one which
taught me that; and therefore I am more grateful to it than if it had
been as full of wonderful pictures as all the natural history books you
ever saw.  Its name was _Evenings at Home_; and in it was a story called
"Eyes and no Eyes;" a regular old-fashioned, prim, sententious story; and
it began thus:--

"Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?" said Mr.
Andrews to one of his pupils at the close of a holiday.

Oh--Robert had been to Broom Heath, and round by Camp Mount, and home
through the meadows.  But it was very dull.  He hardly saw a single
person.  He had much rather have gone by the turnpike-road.

Presently in comes Master William, the other pupil, dressed, I suppose,
as wretched boys used to be dressed forty years ago, in a frill collar,
and skeleton monkey-jacket, and tight trousers buttoned over it, and
hardly coming down to his ancles; and low shoes, which always came off in
sticky ground; and terribly dirty and wet he is: but he never (he says)
had such a pleasant walk in his life; and he has brought home his
handkerchief (for boys had no pockets in those days much bigger than key-
holes) full of curiosities.

He has got a piece of mistletoe, wants to know what it is; and he has
seen a woodpecker, and a wheat-ear, and gathered strange flowers on the
heath; and hunted a peewit because he thought its wing was broken, till
of course it led him into a bog, and very wet he got.  But he did not
mind it, because he fell in with an old man cutting turf, who told him
all about turf-cutting, and gave him a dead adder.  And then he went up a
hill, and saw a grand prospect; and wanted to go again, and make out the
geography of the country from Cary's old county maps, which were the only
maps in those days.  And then, because the hill was called Camp Mount, he
looked for a Roman camp, and found one; and then he went down to the
river, saw twenty things more; and so on, and so on, till he had brought
home curiosities enough, and thoughts enough, to last him a week.

Whereon Mr. Andrews, who seems to have been a very sensible old
gentleman, tells him all about his curiosities: and then it comes out--if
you will believe it--that Master William has been over the very same
ground as Master Robert, who saw nothing at all.

Whereon Mr. Andrews says, wisely enough, in his solemn old-fashioned
way,--

"So it is.  One man walks through the world with his eyes open, another
with his eyes shut; and upon this difference depends all the superiority
of knowledge which one man acquires over another.  I have known sailors
who had been in all the quarters of the world, and could tell you nothing
but the signs of the tippling-houses, and the price and quality of the
liquor.  On the other hand, Franklin could not cross the Channel without
making observations useful to mankind.  While many a vacant thoughtless
youth is whirled through Europe without gaining a single idea worth
crossing the street for, the observing eye and inquiring mind find matter
of improvement and delight in every ramble.  You, then, William, continue
to use your eyes.  And you, Robert, learn that eyes were given to you to
use."

So said Mr. Andrews: and so I say, dear boys--and so says he who has the
charge of you--to you.  Therefore I beg all good boys among you to think
over this story, and settle in their own minds whether they will be eyes
or no eyes; whether they will, as they grow up, look and see for
themselves what happens: or whether they will let other people look for
them, or pretend to look; and dupe them, and lead them about--the blind
leading the blind, till both fall into the ditch.

I say "good boys;" not merely clever boys, or prudent boys: because using
your eyes, or not using them, is a question of doing Right or doing
Wrong.  God has given you eyes; it is your duty to God to use them.  If
your parents tried to teach you your lessons in the most agreeable way,
by beautiful picture-books, would it not be ungracious, ungrateful, and
altogether naughty and wrong, to shut your eyes to those pictures, and
refuse to learn?  And is it not altogether naughty and wrong to refuse to
learn from your Father in Heaven, the Great God who made all things, when
he offers to teach you all day long by the most beautiful and most
wonderful of all picture-books, which is simply all things which you can
see, hear, and touch, from the sun and stars above your head to the
mosses and insects at your feet?  It is your duty to learn His lessons:
and it is your interest.  God's Book, which is the Universe, and the
reading of God's Book, which is Science, can do you nothing but good, and
teach you nothing but truth and wisdom.  God did not put this wondrous
world about your young souls to tempt or to mislead them.  If you ask Him
for a fish, he will not give you a serpent.  If you ask Him for bread, He
will not give you a stone.

So use your eyes and your intellect, your senses and your brains, and
learn what God is trying to teach you continually by them.  I do not mean
that you must stop there, and learn nothing more.  Anything but that.
There are things which neither your senses nor your brains can tell you;
and they are not only more glorious, but actually more true and more real
than any things which you can see or touch.  But you must begin at the
beginning in order to end at the end, and sow the seed if you wish to
gather the fruit.  God has ordained that you, and every child which comes
into the world, should begin by learning something of the world about him
by his senses and his brain; and the better you learn what they can teach
you, the more fit you will be to learn what they cannot teach you.  The
more you try now to understand _things_, the more you will be able
hereafter to understand men, and That which is above men.  You began to
find out that truly Divine mystery, that you had a mother on earth,
simply by lying soft and warm upon her bosom; and so (as Our Lord told
the Jews of old) it is by watching the common natural things around you,
and considering the lilies of the field, how they grow, that you will
begin at least to learn that far Diviner mystery, that you have a Father
in Heaven.  And so you will be delivered (if you will) out of the tyranny
of darkness, and distrust, and fear, into God's free kingdom of light,
and faith, and love; and will be safe from the venom of that tree which
is more deadly than the fabled upas of the East.  Who planted that tree I
know not, it was planted so long ago: but surely it is none of God's
planting, neither of the Son of God: yet it grows in all lands and in all
climes, and sends its hidden suckers far and wide, even (unless we be
watchful) into your hearts and mine.  And its name is the Tree of
Unreason, whose roots are conceit and ignorance, and its juices folly and
death.  It drops its venom into the finest brains; and makes them call
sense, nonsense; and nonsense, sense; fact, fiction; and fiction, fact.
It drops its venom into the tenderest hearts, alas! and makes them call
wrong, right; and right, wrong; love, cruelty; and cruelty, love.  Some
say that the axe is laid to the root of it just now, and that it is
already tottering to its fall: while others say that it is growing
stronger than ever, and ready to spread its upas-shade over the whole
earth.  For my part, I know not, save that all shall be as God wills.  The
tree has been cut down already again and again; and yet has always thrown
out fresh shoots and dropped fresh poison from its boughs.  But this at
least I know: that any little child, who will use the faculties God has
given him, may find an antidote to all its poison in the meanest herb
beneath his feet.

There, you do not understand me, my boys; and the best prayer I can offer
for you is, perhaps, that you should never need to understand me: but if
that sore need should come, and that poison should begin to spread its
mist over your brains and hearts, then you will be proof against it; just
in proportion as you have used the eyes and the common sense which God
has given you, and have considered the lilies of the field, how they
grow.

C. KINGSLEY.




CHAPTER I--THE GLEN


You find it dull walking up here upon Hartford Bridge Flat this sad
November day?  Well, I do not deny that the moor looks somewhat dreary,
though dull it need never be.  Though the fog is clinging to the
fir-trees, and creeping among the heather, till you cannot see as far as
Minley Corner, hardly as far as Bramshill woods--and all the Berkshire
hills are as invisible as if it was a dark midnight--yet there is plenty
to be seen here at our very feet.  Though there is nothing left for you
to pick, and all the flowers are dead and brown, except here and there a
poor half-withered scrap of bottle-heath, and nothing left for you to
catch either, for the butterflies and insects are all dead too, except
one poor old Daddy-long-legs, who sits upon that piece of turf, boring a
hole with her tail to lay her eggs in, before the frost catches her and
ends her like the rest: though all things, I say, seem dead, yet there is
plenty of life around you, at your feet, I may almost say in the very
stones on which you tread.  And though the place itself be dreary enough,
a sheet of flat heather and a little glen in it, with banks of dead fern,
and a brown bog between them, and a few fir-trees struggling up--yet, if
you only have eyes to see it, that little bit of glen is beautiful and
wonderful,--so beautiful and so wonderful and so cunningly devised, that
it took thousands of years to make it; and it is not, I believe, half
finished yet.

How do I know all that?  Because a fairy told it me; a fairy who lives up
here upon the moor, and indeed in most places else, if people have but
eyes to see her.  What is her name?  I cannot tell.  The best name that I
can give her (and I think it must be something like her real name,
because she will always answer if you call her by it patiently and
reverently) is Madam How.  She will come in good time, if she is called,
even by a little child.  And she will let us see her at her work, and,
what is more, teach us to copy her.  But there is another fairy here
likewise, whom we can hardly hope to see.  Very thankful should we be if
she lifted even the smallest corner of her veil, and showed us but for a
moment if it were but her finger tip--so beautiful is she, and yet so
awful too.  But that sight, I believe, would not make us proud, as if we
had had some great privilege.  No, my dear child: it would make us feel
smaller, and meaner, and more stupid and more ignorant than we had ever
felt in our lives before; at the same time it would make us wiser than
ever we were in our lives before--that one glimpse of the great glory of
her whom we call Lady Why.

But I will say more of her presently.  We must talk first with Madam How,
and perhaps she may help us hereafter to see Lady Why.  For she is the
servant, and Lady Why is the mistress; though she has a Master over her
again--whose name I leave for you to guess.  You have heard it often
already, and you will hear it again, for ever and ever.

But of one thing I must warn you, that you must not confound Madam How
and Lady Why.  Many people do it, and fall into great mistakes
thereby,--mistakes that even a little child, if it would think, need not
commit.  But really great philosophers sometimes make this mistake about
Why and How; and therefore it is no wonder if other people make it too,
when they write children's books about the wonders of nature, and call
them "Why and Because," or "The Reason Why."  The books are very good
books, and you should read and study them: but they do not tell you
really "Why and Because," but only "How and So."  They do not tell you
the "Reason Why" things happen, but only "The Way in which they happen."
However, I must not blame these good folks, for I have made the same
mistake myself often, and may do it again: but all the more shame to me.
For see--you know perfectly the difference between How and Why, when you
are talking about yourself.  If I ask you, "Why did we go out to-day?"
You would not answer, "Because we opened the door."  That is the answer
to "How did we go out?"  The answer to Why did we go out is, "Because we
chose to take a walk."  Now when we talk about other things beside
ourselves, we must remember this same difference between How and Why.  If
I ask you, "Why does fire burn you?" you would answer, I suppose, being a
little boy, "Because it is hot;" which is all you know about it.  But if
you were a great chemist, instead of a little boy, you would be apt to
answer me, I am afraid, "Fire burns because the vibratory motion of the
molecules of the heated substance communicates itself to the molecules of
my skin, and so destroys their tissue;" which is, I dare say, quite true:
but it only tells us how fire burns, the way or means by which it burns;
it does not tell us the reason why it burns.

But you will ask, "If that is not the reason why fire burns, what is?"  My
dear child, I do not know.  That is Lady Why's business, who is mistress
of Mrs. How, and of you and of me; and, as I think, of all things that
you ever saw, or can see, or even dream.  And what her reason for making
fire burn may be I cannot tell.  But I believe on excellent grounds that
her reason is a very good one.  If I dare to guess, I should say that one
reason, at least, why fire burns, is that you may take care not to play
with it, and so not only scorch your finger, but set your whole bed on
fire, and perhaps the house into the bargain, as you might be tempted to
do if putting your finger in the fire were as pleasant as putting sugar
in your mouth.

My dear child, if I could once get clearly into your head this difference
between Why and How, so that you should remember them steadily in after
life, I should have done you more good than if I had given you a thousand
pounds.

But now that we know that How and Why are two very different matters, and
must not be confounded with each other, let us look for Madam How, and
see her at work making this little glen; for, as I told you, it is not
half made yet.  One thing we shall see at once, and see it more and more
clearly the older we grow; I mean her wonderful patience and diligence.
Madam How is never idle for an instant.  Nothing is too great or too
small for her; and she keeps her work before her eye in the same moment,
and makes every separate bit of it help every other bit.  She will keep
the sun and stars in order, while she looks after poor old Mrs. Daddy-
long-legs there and her eggs.  She will spend thousands of years in
building up a mountain, and thousands of years in grinding it down again;
and then carefully polish every grain of sand which falls from that
mountain, and put it in its right place, where it will be wanted
thousands of years hence; and she will take just as much trouble about
that one grain of sand as she did about the whole mountain.  She will
settle the exact place where Mrs. Daddy-long-legs shall lay her eggs, at
the very same time that she is settling what shall happen hundreds of
years hence in a stair millions of miles away.  And I really believe that
Madam How knows her work so thoroughly, that the grain of sand which
sticks now to your shoe, and the weight of Mrs. Daddy-long-legs' eggs at
the bottom of her hole, will have an effect upon suns and stars ages
after you and I are dead and gone.  Most patient indeed is Madam How.  She
does not mind the least seeing her own work destroyed; she knows that it
must be destroyed.  There is a spell upon her, and a fate, that
everything she makes she must unmake again: and yet, good and wise woman
as she is, she never frets, nor tires, nor fudges her work, as we say at
school.  She takes just as much pains to make an acorn as to make a
peach.  She takes just as much pains about the acorn which the pig eats,
as about the acorn which will grow into a tall oak, and help to build a
great ship.  She took just as much pains, again, about the acorn which
you crushed under your foot just now, and which you fancy will never come
to anything.  Madam How is wiser than that.  She knows that it will come
to something.  She will find some use for it, as she finds a use for
everything.  That acorn which you crushed will turn into mould, and that
mould will go to feed the roots of some plant, perhaps next year, if it
lies where it is; or perhaps it will be washed into the brook, and then
into the river, and go down to the sea, and will feed the roots of some
plant in some new continent ages and ages hence: and so Madam How will
have her own again.  You dropped your stick into the river yesterday, and
it floated away.  You were sorry, because it had cost you a great deal of
trouble to cut it, and peel it, and carve a head and your name on it.
Madam How was not sorry, though she had taken a great deal more trouble
with that stick than ever you had taken.  She had been three years making
that stick, out of many things, sunbeams among the rest.  But when it
fell into the river, Madam How knew that she should not lose her sunbeams
nor anything else: the stick would float down the river, and on into the
sea; and there, when it got heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and
lodge, and be buried, and perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages
after that some one would dig it up and burn it, and then out would come,
as bright warm flame, all the sunbeams that were stored away in that
stick: and so Madam How would have her own again.  And if that should not
be the fate of your stick, still something else will happen to it just as
useful in the long run; for Madam How never loses anything, but uses up
all her scraps and odds and ends somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit
and proper for the Housekeeper of the whole Universe.  Indeed, Madam How
is so patient that some people fancy her stupid, and think that, because
she does not fall into a passion every time you steal her sweets, or
break her crockery, or disarrange her furniture, therefore she does not
care.  But I advise you as a little boy, and still more when you grow up
to be a man, not to get that fancy into your head; for you will find
that, however good-natured and patient Madam How is in most matters, her
keeping silence and not seeming to see you is no sign that she has
forgotten.  On the contrary, she bears a grudge (if one may so say, with
all respect to her) longer than any one else does; because she will
always have her own again.  Indeed, I sometimes think that if it were not
for Lady Why, her mistress, she might bear some of her grudges for ever
and ever.  I have seen men ere now damage some of Madam How's property
when they were little boys, and be punished by her all their lives long,
even though she had mended the broken pieces, or turned them to some
other use.  Therefore I say to you, beware of Madam How.  She will teach
you more kindly, patiently, and tenderly than any mother, if you want to
learn her trade.  But if, instead of learning her trade, you damage her
materials and play with her tools, beware lest she has her own again out
of you.

Some people think, again, that Madam How is not only stupid, but
ill-tempered and cruel; that she makes earthquakes and storms, and famine
and pestilences, in a sort of blind passion, not caring where they go or
whom they hurt; quite heedless of who is in the way, if she wants to do
anything or go anywhere.  Now, that Madam How can be very terrible there
can be no doubt: but there is no doubt also that, if people choose to
learn, she will teach them to get out of her way whenever she has
business to do which is dangerous to them.  But as for her being cruel
and unjust, those may believe it who like.  You, my dear boys and girls,
need not believe it, if you will only trust to Lady Why; and be sure that
Why is the mistress and How the servant, now and for ever.  That Lady Why
is utterly good and kind I know full well; and I believe that, in her
case too, the old proverb holds, "Like mistress, like servant;" and that
the more we know of Madam How, the more we shall be content with her, and
ready to submit to whatever she does: but not with that stupid
resignation which some folks preach who do not believe in lady Why--that
is no resignation at all.  That is merely saying--

   "What can't be cured
   Must be endured,"

like a donkey when he turns his tail to a hail-storm,--but the true
resignation, the resignation which is fit for grown people and children
alike, the resignation which is the beginning and the end of all wisdom
and all religion, is to believe that Lady Why knows best, because she
herself is perfectly good; and that as she is mistress over Madam How, so
she has a Master over her, whose name--I say again--I leave you to guess.

So now that I have taught you not to be afraid of Madam How, we will go
and watch her at her work; and if we do not understand anything we see,
we will ask her questions.  She will always show us one of her lesson
books if we give her time.  And if we have to wait some time for her
answer, you need not fear catching cold, though it is November; for she
keeps her lesson books scattered about in strange places, and we may have
to walk up and down that hill more than once before we can make out how
she makes the glen.

Well--how was the glen made?  You shall guess it if you like, and I will
guess too.  You think, perhaps, that an earthquake opened it?

My dear child, we must look before we guess.  Then, after we have looked
a little, and got some grounds for guessing, then we may guess.  And you
have no ground for supposing there ever was an earthquake here strong
enough to open that glen.  There may have been one: but we must guess
from what we do know, and not from what we do not.

Guess again.  Perhaps it was there always, from the beginning of the
world?  My dear child, you have no proof of that either.  Everything
round you is changing in shape daily and hourly, as you will find out the
longer you live; and therefore it is most reasonable to suppose that this
glen has changed its shape, as everything else on earth has done.
Besides, I told you not that Madam How had made the glen, but that she
was making it, and as yet has only half finished.  That is my first
guess; and my next guess is that water is making the glen--water, and
nothing else.

You open your young eyes.  And I do not blame you.  I looked at this very
glen for fifteen years before I made that guess; and I have looked at it
some ten years since, to make sure that my guess held good.  For man
after all is very blind, my dear boy, and very stupid, and cannot see
what lies under his own feet all day long; and if Lady Why, and He whom
Lady Why obeys, were not very patient and gentle with mankind, they would
have perished off the face of the earth long ago, simply from their own
stupidity.  I, at least, was very stupid in this case, for I had my head
full of earthquakes, and convulsions of nature, and all sorts of
prodigies which never happened to this glen; and so, while I was trying
to find what was not there, I of course found nothing.  But when I put
them all out of my head, and began to look for what was there, I found it
at once; and lo and behold! I had seen it a thousand times before, and
yet never learnt anything from it, like a stupid man as I was; though
what I learnt you may learn as easily as I did.

And what did I find?

The pond at the bottom of the glen.

You know that pond, of course?  You don't need to go there?  Very well.
Then if you do, do not you know also that the pond is always filling up
with sand and mud; and that though we clean it out every three or four
years, it always fills again?  Now where does that sand and mud come
from?

Down that stream, of course, which runs out of this bog.  You see it
coming down every time there is a flood, and the stream fouls.

Very well.  Then, said Madam How to me, as soon as I recollected that,
"Don't you see, you stupid man, that the stream has made the glen, and
the earth which runs down the stream was all once part of the hill on
which you stand."  I confess I was very much ashamed of myself when she
said that.  For that is the history of the whole mystery.  Madam How is
digging away with her soft spade, water.  She has a harder spade, or
rather plough, the strongest and most terrible of all ploughs; but that,
I am glad to say, she has laid by in England here.

Water?  But water is too simple a thing to have dug out all this great
glen.

My dear child, the most wonderful part of Madam How's work is, that she
does such great things and so many different things, with one and the
same tool, which looks to you so simple, though it really is not so.
Water, for instance, is not a simple thing, but most complicated; and we
might spend hours in talking about water, without having come to the end
of its wonders.  Still Madam How is a great economist, and never wastes
her materials.  She is like the sailor who boasted (only she never
boasts) that, if he had but a long life and a strong knife, he would
build St. Paul's Cathedral before he was done.  And Madam How has a very
long life, and plenty of time; and one of the strongest of all her tools
is water.  Now if you will stoop down and look into the heather, I will
show you how she is digging out the glen with this very mist which is
hanging about our feet.  At least, so I guess.

For see how the mist clings to the points of the heather leaves, and
makes drops.  If the hot sun came out the drops would dry, and they would
vanish into the air in light warm steam.  But now that it is dark and
cold they drip, or run down the heather-stems, to the ground.  And
whither do they go then?  Whither will the water go,--hundreds of gallons
of it perhaps,--which has dripped and run through the heather in this
single day?  It will sink into the ground, you know.  And then what will
become of it?  Madam How will use it as an underground spade, just as she
uses the rain (at least, when it rains too hard, and therefore the rain
runs off the moor instead of sinking into it) as a spade above ground.

Now come to the edge of the glen, and I will show you the mist that fell
yesterday, perhaps, coming out of the ground again, and hard at work.

You know of what an odd, and indeed of what a pretty form all these glens
are.  How the flat moor ends suddenly in a steep rounded bank, almost
like the crest of a wave--ready like a wave-crest to fall over, and as
you know, falling over sometimes, bit by bit, where the soil is bare.

Oh, yes; you are very fond of those banks.  It is "awfully jolly," as you
say, scrambling up and down them, in the deep heath and fern; besides,
there are plenty of rabbit-holes there, because they are all sand; while
there are no rabbit-holes on the flat above, because it is all gravel.

Yes; you know all about it: but you know, too, that you must not go too
far down these banks, much less roll down them, because there is almost
certain to be a bog at the bottom, lying upon a gentle slope; and there
you get wet through.

All round these hills, from here to Aldershot in one direction, and from
here to Windsor in another, you see the same shaped glens; the wave-crest
along their top, and at the foot of the crest a line of springs which run
out over the slopes, or well up through them in deep sand-galls, as you
call them--shaking quagmires which are sometimes deep enough to swallow
up a horse, and which you love to dance upon in summer time.  Now the
water of all these springs is nothing but the rain, and mist, and dew,
which has sunk down first through the peaty soil, and then through the
gravel and sand, and there has stopped.  And why?  Because under the
gravel (about which I will tell you a strange story one day) and under
the sand, which is what the geologists call the Upper Bagshot sand, there
is an entirely different set of beds, which geologists call the
Bracklesham beds, from a place near the New Forest; and in those beds
there is a vein of clay, and through that clay the water cannot get, as
you have seen yourself when we dug it out in the field below to puddle
the pond-head; and very good fun you thought it, and a very pretty mess
you made of yourself.  Well: because the water cannot get though this
clay, and must go somewhere, it runs out continually along the top of the
clay, and as it runs undermines the bank, and brings down sand and gravel
continually for the next shower to wash into the stream below.

Now think for one moment how wonderful it is that the shape of these
glens, of which you are so fond, was settled by the particular order in
which Madam How laid down the gravel and sand and mud at the bottom of
the sea, ages and ages ago.  This is what I told you, that the least
thing that Madam How does to-day may take effect hundreds and thousands
of years hence.

But I must tell you I think there was a time when this glen was of a very
different shape from what it is now; and I dare say, according to your
notions, of a much prettier shape.  It was once just like one of those
Chines which we used to see at Bournemouth.  You recollect them?  How
there was a narrow gap in the cliff of striped sands and gravels; and out
of the mouth of that gap, only a few feet across, there poured down a
great slope of mud and sand the shape of half a bun, some wet and some
dry, up which we used to scramble and get into the Chine, and call the
Chine what it was in the truest sense, Fairyland.  You recollect how it
was all eaten out into mountain ranges, pinnacles, steep cliffs of white,
and yellow, and pink, standing up against the clear blue sky; till we
agreed that, putting aside the difference of size, they were as beautiful
and grand as any Alps we had ever seen in pictures.  And how we saw (for
there could be no mistake about it there) that the Chine was being
hollowed out by the springs which broke out high up the cliff, and by the
rain which wore the sand into furrowed pinnacles and peaks.  You
recollect the beautiful place, and how, when we looked back down it we
saw between the miniature mountain walls the bright blue sea, and heard
it murmur on the sands outside.  So I verily believe we might have done,
if we had stood somewhere at the bottom of this glen thousands of years
ago.  We should have seen the sea in front of us; or rather, an arm of
the sea; for Finchampstead ridges opposite, instead of being covered with
farms, and woodlands, and purple heath above, would have been steep
cliffs of sand and clay, just like those you see at Bournemouth now;
and--what would have spoilt somewhat the beauty of the sight--along the
shores there would have floated, at least in winter, great blocks and
floes of ice, such as you might have seen in the tideway at King's Lynn
the winter before last, growling and crashing, grubbing and ploughing the
sand, and the gravel, and the mud, and sweeping them away into seas
towards the North, which are now all fruitful land.  That may seem to you
like a dream: yet it is true; and some day, when we have another talk
with Madam How, I will show even a child like you that it was true.

But what could change a beautiful Chine like that at Bournemouth into a
wide sloping glen like this of Bracknell's Bottom, with a wood like
Coombs', many acres large, in the middle of it?  Well now, think.  It is
a capital plan for finding out Madam How's secrets, to see what she might
do in one place, and explain by it what she has done in another.  Suppose
now, Madam How had orders to lift up the whole coast of Bournemouth only
twenty or even ten feet higher out of the sea than it is now.  She could
do that easily enough, for she has been doing so on the coast of South
America for ages; she has been doing so this very summer in what hasty
people would call a hasty, and violent, and ruthless way; though I shall
not say so, for I believe that Lady Why knows best.  She is doing so now
steadily on the west coast of Norway, which is rising quietly--all that
vast range of mountain wall and iron-bound cliff--at the rate of some
four feet in a hundred years, without making the least noise or
confusion, or even causing an extra ripple on the sea; so light and
gentle, when she will, can Madam How's strong finger be.

Now, if the mouth of that Chine at Bournemouth was lifted twenty feet out
of the sea, one thing would happen,--that the high tide would not come up
any longer, and wash away the cake of dirt at the entrance, as we saw it
do so often.  But if the mud stopped there, the mud behind it would come
down more slowly, and lodge inside more and more, till the Chine was half
filled-up, and only the upper part of the cliffs continue to be eaten
away, above the level where the springs ran out.  So gradually the Chine,
instead of being deep and narrow, would become broad and shallow; and
instead of hollowing itself rapidly after every shower of rain, as you
saw the Chine at Bournemouth doing, would hollow itself out slowly, as
this glen is doing now.  And one thing more would happen,--when the sea
ceased to gnaw at the foot of the cliffs outside, and to carry away every
stone and grain of sand which fell from them, the cliffs would very soon
cease to be cliffs; the rain and the frost would still crumble them down,
but the dirt that fell would lie at their feet, and gradually make a
slope of dry land, far out where the shallow sea had been; and their
tops, instead of being steep as now, would become smooth and rounded; and
so at last, instead of two sharp walls of cliff at the Chine's mouth, you
might have--just what you have here at the mouth of this glen,--our Mount
and the Warren Hill,--long slopes with sheets of drifted gravel and sand
at their feet, stretching down into what was once an icy sea, and is now
the Vale of Blackwater.  And this I really believe Madam How has done
simply by lifting Hartford Bridge Flat a few more feet out of the sea,
and leaving the rest to her trusty tool, the water in the sky.

That is my guess: and I think it is a good guess, because I have asked
Madam How a hundred different questions about it in the last ten years,
and she always answered them in the same way, saying, "Water, water, you
stupid man."  But I do not want you merely to depend on what I say.  If
you want to understand Madam How, you must ask her questions yourself,
and make up your mind yourself like a man, instead of taking things at
hearsay or second-hand, like the vulgar.  Mind, by "the vulgar" I do not
mean poor people: I mean ignorant and uneducated people, who do not use
their brains rightly, though they may be fine ladies, kings, or popes.
The Bible says, "Prove all things: hold fast that which is good."  So do
you prove my guess, and if it proves good, hold it fast.

And how can I do that?

First, by direct experiment, as it is called.  In plain English--go home
and make a little Hartford Bridge Flat in the stable-yard; and then ask
Mrs. How if she will not make a glen in it like this glen here.  We will
go home and try that.  We will make a great flat cake of clay, and put
upon it a cap of sand; and then we will rain upon it out of a watering-
pot; and see if Mrs. How does not begin soon to make a glen in the side
of the heap, just like those on Hartford Bridge Flat.  I believe she
will; and certainly, if she does, it will be a fresh proof that my guess
is right.  And then we will see whether water will not make glens of a
different shape than these, if it run over soils of a different kind.  We
will make a Hartford Bridge Flat turned upside down--a cake of sand with
a cap of clay on the top; and we will rain on that out of our watering-
pot, and see what sort of glens we make then.  I can guess what they will
be like, because I have seen them--steep overhanging cliffs, with very
narrow gullies down them: but you shall try for yourself, and make up
your mind whether you think me right or wrong.  Meanwhile, remember that
those gullies too will have been made by water.

And there is another way of "verifying my theory," as it is called; in
plain English, seeing if my guess holds good; that is, to look at other
valleys--not merely the valleys round here, but valleys in clay, in
chalk, in limestone, in the hard slate rock such as you saw in
Devonshire--and see whether my guess does not hold good about them too;
whether all of them, deep or shallow, broad or narrow, rock or earth, may
not have been all hollowed out by running water.  I am sure if you would
do this you would find something to amuse you, and something to instruct
you, whenever you wish.  I know that I do.  To me the longest railroad
journey, instead of being stupid, is like continually turning over the
leaves of a wonderful book, or looking at wonderful pictures of old
worlds which were made and unmade thousands of years ago.  For I keep
looking, not only at the railway cuttings, where the bones of the old
worlds are laid bare, but at the surface of the ground; at the plains and
downs, banks and knolls, hills and mountains; and continually asking Mrs.
How what gave them each its shape: and I will soon teach you to do the
same.  When you do, I tell you fairly her answer will be in almost every
case, "Running water."  Either water running when soft, as it usually is;
or water running when it is hard--in plain words, moving ice.

About that moving ice, which is Mrs. How's stronger spade, I will tell
you some other time; and show you, too, the marks of it in every gravel
pit about here.  But now, I see, you want to ask a question; and what is
it?

Do I mean to say that water has made great valleys, such as you have seen
paintings and photographs of,--valleys thousands of feet deep, among
mountains thousands of feet high?

Yes, I do.  But, as I said before, I do not like you to take my word upon
trust.  When you are older you shall go to the mountains, and you shall
judge for yourself.  Still, I must say that I never saw a valley, however
deep, or a cliff, however high, which had not been scooped out by water;
and that even the mountain-tops which stand up miles aloft in jagged
peaks and pinnacles against the sky were cut out at first, and are being
cut and sharpened still, by little else save water, soft and hard; that
is, by rain, frost, and ice.

Water, and nothing else, has sawn out such a chasm as that through which
the ships run up to Bristol, between Leigh Wood and St. Vincent's Rocks.
Water, and nothing else, has shaped those peaks of the Matterhorn, or the
Weisshorn, or the Pic du Midi of the Pyrenees, of which you have seen
sketches and photographs.  Just so water might saw out Hartford Bridge
Flat, if it had time enough, into a labyrinth of valleys, and hills, and
peaks standing alone; as it has done already by Ambarrow, and Edgbarrow,
and the Folly Hill on the other side of the vale.

I see you are astonished at the notion that water can make Alps.  But it
was just because I knew you would be astonished at Madam How's doing so
great a thing with so simple a tool, that I began by showing you how she
was doing the same thing in a small way here upon these flats.  For the
safest way to learn Madam How's methods is to watch her at work in little
corners at commonplace business, which will not astonish or frighten us,
nor put huge hasty guesses and dreams into our heads.  Sir Isaac Newton,
some will tell you, found out the great law of gravitation, which holds
true of all the suns and stars in heaven, by watching an apple fall: and
even if he did not find it out so, he found it out, we know, by careful
thinking over the plain and commonplace fact, that things have weight.  So
do you be humble and patient, and watch Madam How at work on little
things.  For that is the way to see her at work upon all space and time.

What? you have a question more to ask?

Oh!  I talked about Madam How lifting up Hartford Bridge Flat.  How could
she do that?  My dear child, that is a long story, and I must tell it you
some other time.  Meanwhile, did you ever see the lid of a kettle rise up
and shake when the water inside boiled?  Of course; and of course, too,
remember that Madam How must have done it.  Then think over between this
and our next talk, what that can possibly have to do with her lifting up
Hartford Bridge Flat.  But you have been longing, perhaps, all this time
to hear more about Lady Why, and why she set Madam How to make
Bracknell's Bottom.

My dear child, the only answer I dare give to that is: Whatever other
purposes she may have made it for, she made it at least for this--that
you and I should come to it this day, and look at, and talk over it, and
become thereby wiser and more earnest, and we will hope more humble and
better people.  Whatever else Lady Why may wish or not wish, this she
wishes always, to make all men wise and all men good.  For what is
written of her whom, as in a parable, I have called Lady Why?

"The Lord possessed me in the beginning of His way, before His works of
old.

"I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth
was.

"When there were no depths, I was brought forth; when there were no
fountains abounding with water.

"Before the mountains were settled, before the hills was I brought forth:

"While as yet He had not made the earth, nor the fields, nor the highest
part of the dust of the world.

"When He prepared the heavens, I was there: when He set a compass upon
the face of the depth:

"When He established the clouds above: when He strengthened the fountains
of the deep:

"When He gave to the sea His decree, that the waters should not pass His
commandment: when He appointed the foundations of the earth:

"Then I was by Him, as one brought up with Him: and I was daily His
delight, rejoicing always before Him:

"Rejoicing in the habitable part of His earth; and my delights were with
the sons of men.

"Now therefore hearken unto me, O ye children: for blessed are they that
keep my ways."

That we can say, for it has been said for us already.  But beyond that we
can say, and need say, very little.  We were not there, as we read in the
Book of Job, when God laid the foundations of the earth.  "We see," says
St. Paul, "as in a glass darkly, and only know in part."  "For who," he
asks again, "has known the mind of the Lord, or who hath been His
counsellor? . . . For of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all
things: to whom be glory for ever and ever.  Amen."  Therefore we must
not rashly say, this or that is Why a thing has happened; nor invent what
are called "final causes," which are not Lady Why herself, but only our
little notions of what Lady Why has done, or rather what we should have
done if we had been in her place.  It is not, indeed, by thinking that we
shall find out anything about Lady Why.  She speaks not to our eyes or to
our brains, like Madam How, but to that inner part of us which we call
our hearts and spirits, and which will endure when eyes and brain are
turned again to dust.  If your heart be pure and sober, gentle and
truthful, then Lady Why speaks to you without words, and tells you things
which Madam How and all her pupils, the men of science, can never tell.
When you lie, it may be, on a painful sick-bed, but with your mother's
hand in yours; when you sit by her, looking up into her loving eyes; when
you gaze out towards the setting sun, and fancy golden capes and islands
in the clouds, and seas and lakes in the blue sky, and the infinite rest
and peace of the far west sends rest and peace into your young heart,
till you sit silent and happy, you know not why; when sweet music fills
your heart with noble and tender instincts which need no thoughts or
words; ay, even when you watch the raging thunderstorm, and feel it to
be, in spite of its great awfulness, so beautiful that you cannot turn
your eyes away: at such times as these Lady Why is speaking to your soul
of souls, and saying, "My child, this world is a new place, and strange,
and often terrible: but be not afraid.  All will come right at last.  Rest
will conquer Restlessness; Faith will conquer Fear; Order will conquer
Disorder; Health will conquer Sickness; Joy will conquer Sorrow; Pleasure
will conquer Pain; Life will conquer Death; Right will conquer Wrong.  All
will be well at last.  Keep your soul and body pure, humble, busy,
pious--in one word, be good: and ere you die, or after you die, you may
have some glimpse of Me, the Everlasting Why: and hear with the ears, not
of your body but of your spirit, men and all rational beings, plants and
animals, ay, the very stones beneath your feet, the clouds above your
head, the planets and the suns away in farthest space, singing eternally,

"'Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power, for
Thou hast created all things, and for Thy pleasure they are and were
created."'




CHAPTER II--EARTHQUAKES


So?  You have been looking at that beautiful drawing of the ruin of Arica
in the _Illustrated London News_: and it has puzzled you and made you
sad.  You want to know why God killed all those people--mothers among
them, too, and little children?

Alas, my dear child! who am I that I should answer you that?

Have you done wrong in asking me?  No, my dear child; no.  You have asked
me because you are a human being and a child of God, and not merely a
cleverer sort of animal, an ape who can read and write and cast accounts.
Therefore it is that you cannot be content, and ought not to be content,
with asking how things happen, but must go on to ask why.  You cannot be
content with knowing the causes of things; and if you knew all the
natural science that ever was or ever will be known to men, that would
not satisfy you; for it would only tell you the _causes_ of things, while
your souls want to know the _reasons_ of things besides; and though I may
not be able to tell you the reasons of things, or show you aught but a
tiny glimpse here and there of that which I called the other day the
glory of Lady Why, yet I believe that somehow, somewhen, somewhere, you
will learn something of the reason of things.  For that thirst to know
_why_ was put into the hearts of little children by God Himself; and I
believe that God would never have given them that thirst if He had not
meant to satisfy it.

There--you do not understand me.  I trust that you will understand me
some day.  Meanwhile, I think--I only say I _think_--you know I told you
how humble we must be whenever we speak of Lady Why--that we may guess at
something like a good reason for the terrible earthquakes in South
America.  I do not wish to be hard upon poor people in great affliction:
but I cannot help thinking that they have been doing for hundreds of
years past something very like what the Bible calls "tempting
God"--staking their property and their lives upon the chances of no
earthquakes coming, while they ought to have known that an earthquake
might come any day.  They have fulfilled (and little thought I that it
would be fulfilled so soon) the parable that I told you once, of the
nation of the Do-as-you-likes, who lived careless and happy at the foot
of the burning mountain, and would not be warned by the smoke that came
out of the top, or by the slag and cinders which lay all about them; till
the mountain blew up, and destroyed them miserably.

Then I think that they ought to have expected an earthquake.

Well--it is not for us to judge any one, especially if they live in a
part of the world in which we have not been ourselves.  But I think that
we know, and that they ought to have known, enough about earthquakes to
have been more prudent than they have been for many a year.  At least we
will hope that, though they would not learn their lesson till this year,
they will learn it now, and will listen to the message which I think
Madam How has brought them, spoken in a voice of thunder, and written in
letters of flame.

And what is that?

My dear child, if the landlord of our house was in the habit of pulling
the roof down upon our heads, and putting gunpowder under the foundations
to blow us up, do you not think we should know what he meant, even though
he never spoke a word?  He would be very wrong in behaving so, of course:
but one thing would be certain,--that he did not intend us to live in his
house any longer if he could help it; and was giving us, in a very rough
fashion, notice to quit.  And so it seems to me that these poor Spanish
Americans have received from the Landlord of all landlords, who can do no
wrong, such a notice to quit as perhaps no people ever had before; which
says to them in unmistakable words, "You must leave this country: or
perish."  And I believe that that message, like all Lady Why's messages,
is at heart a merciful and loving one; that if these Spaniards would
leave the western coast of Peru, and cross the Andes into the green
forests of the eastern side of their own land, they might not only live
free from earthquakes, but (if they would only be good and industrious)
become a great, rich, and happy nation, instead of the idle, and useless,
and I am afraid not over good, people which they have been.  For in that
eastern part of their own land God's gifts are waiting for them, in a
paradise such as I can neither describe nor you conceive;--precious
woods, fruits, drugs, and what not--boundless wealth, in one word--waiting
for them to send it all down the waters of the mighty river Amazon,
enriching us here in the Old World, and enriching themselves there in the
New.  If they would only go and use these gifts of God, instead of
neglecting them as they have been doing for now three hundred years, they
would be a blessing to the earth, instead of being--that which they have
been.

God grant, my dear child, that these poor people may take the warning
that has been sent to them; "The voice of God revealed in facts," as the
great Lord Bacon would have called it, and see not only that God has
bidden them leave the place where they are now, but has prepared for
them, in their own land, a home a thousand times better than that in
which they now live.

But you ask, How ought they to have known that an earthquake would come?

Well, to make you understand that, we must talk a little about
earthquakes, and what makes them; and in order to find out that, let us
try the very simplest cause of which we can think.  That is the wise and
scientific plan.

Now, whatever makes these earthquakes must be enormously strong; that is
certain.  And what is the strongest thing you know of in the world?  Think
. . .

Gunpowder?

Well, gunpowder is strong sometimes: but not always.  You may carry it in
a flask, or in your hand, and then it is weak enough.  It only becomes
strong by being turned into gas and steam.  But steam is always strong.
And if you look at a railway engine, still more if you had ever
seen--which God forbid you should--a boiler explosion, you would agree
with me, that the strongest thing we know of in the world is steam.

Now I think that we can explain almost, if not quite, all that we know
about earthquakes, if we believe that on the whole they are caused by
steam and other gases expanding, that is, spreading out, with wonderful
quickness and strength.  Of course there must be something to make them
expand, and that is _heat_.  But we will not talk of that yet.

Now do you remember that riddle which I put to you the other day?--"What
had the rattling of the lid of the kettle to do with Hartford Bridge Flat
being lifted out of the ancient sea?"

The answer to the riddle, I believe, is--Steam has done both.  The lid of
the kettle rattles, because the expanding steam escapes in little jets,
and so causes a _lid-quake_.  Now suppose that there was steam under the
earth trying to escape, and the earth in one place was loose and yet
hard, as the lid of the kettle is loose and yet hard, with cracks in it,
it may be, like the crack between the edge of the lid and the edge of the
kettle itself: might not the steam try to escape through the cracks, and
rattle the surface of the earth, and so cause an _earthquake_?

So the steam would escape generally easily, and would only make a passing
rattle, like the earthquake of which the famous jester Charles Selwyn
said that it was quite a young one, so tame that you might have stroked
it; like that which I myself once felt in the Pyrenees, which gave me
very solemn thoughts after a while, though at first I did nothing but
laugh at it; and I will tell you why.

I was travelling in the Pyrenees; and I came one evening to the loveliest
spot--a glen, or rather a vast crack in the mountains, so narrow that
there was no room for anything at the bottom of it, save a torrent
roaring between walls of polished rock.  High above the torrent the road
was cut out among the cliffs, and above the road rose more cliffs, with
great black cavern mouths, hundreds of feet above our heads, out of each
of which poured in foaming waterfalls streams large enough to turn a
mill, and above them mountains piled on mountains, all covered with woods
of box, which smelt rich and hot and musky in the warm spring air.  Among
the box-trees and fallen boulders grew hepaticas, blue and white and red,
such as you see in the garden; and little stars of gentian, more azure
than the azure sky.  But out of the box-woods above rose giant silver
firs, clothing the cliffs and glens with tall black spires, till they
stood out at last in a jagged saw-edge against the purple evening sky,
along the mountain ranges, thousands of feet aloft; and beyond them
again, at the head of the valley, rose vast cones of virgin snow, miles
away in reality, but looking so brilliant and so near that one fancied at
the first moment that one could have touched them with one's hand.  Snow-
white they stood, the glorious things, seven thousand feet into the air;
and I watched their beautiful white sides turn rose-colour in the evening
sun, and when he set, fade into dull cold gray, till the bright moon came
out to light them up once more.  When I was tired of wondering and
admiring, I went into bed; and there I had a dream--such a dream as Alice
had when she went into Wonderland--such a dream as I dare say you may
have had ere now.  Some noise or stir puts into your fancy as you sleep a
whole long dream to account for it; and yet that dream, which seems to
you to be hours long, has not taken up a second of time; for the very
same noise which begins the dream, wakes you at the end of it: and so it
was with me.  I dreamed that some English people had come into the hotel
where I was, and were sleeping in the room underneath me; and that they
had quarrelled and fought, and broke their bed down with a tremendous
crash, and that I must get up, and stop the fight; and at that moment I
woke and heard coming up the valley from the north such a roar as I never
heard before or since; as if a hundred railway trains were rolling
underground; and just as it passed under my bed there was a tremendous
thump, and I jumped out of bed quicker than I ever did in my life, and
heard the roaring sound die away as it rolled up the valley towards the
peaks of snow.  Still I had in my head this notion of the Englishmen
fighting in the room below.  But then I recollected that no Englishmen
had come in the night before, and that I had been in the room below, and
that there was no bed in it.  Then I opened my window--a woman screamed,
a dog barked, some cocks and hens cackled in a very disturbed humour, and
then I could hear nothing but the roaring of the torrent a hundred feet
below.  And then it flashed across me what all the noise was about; and I
burst out laughing and said "It is only an earthquake," and went to bed

Next morning I inquired whether any one had heard a noise.  No, nobody
had heard anything.  And the driver who had brought me up the valley only
winked, but did not choose to speak.  At last at breakfast I asked the
pretty little maid who waited what was the meaning of the noise I heard
in the night, and she answered, to my intense amusement, "Ah! bah! ce
n'etait qu'un tremblement de terre; il y en a ici toutes les six
semaines."  Now the secret was out.  The little maid, I found, came from
the lowland far away, and did not mind telling the truth: but the good
people of the place were afraid to let out that they had earthquakes
every six weeks, for fear of frightening visitors away: and because they
were really very good people, and very kind to me, I shall not tell you
what the name of the place is.

Of course after that I could do no less than ask Madam How, very civilly,
how she made earthquakes in that particular place, hundreds of miles away
from any burning mountain?  And this was the answer I _thought_ she gave,
though I am not so conceited as to say I am sure.

As I had come up the valley I had seen that the cliffs were all beautiful
gray limestone marble; but just at this place they were replaced by
granite, such as you may see in London Bridge or at Aberdeen.  I do not
mean that the limestone changed to granite, but that the granite had
risen up out of the bottom of the valley, and had carried the limestone
(I suppose) up on its back hundreds of feet into the air.  Those caves
with the waterfalls pouring from their mouths were all on one level, at
the top of the granite, and the bottom of the limestone.  That was to be
expected; for, as I will explain to you some day, water can make caves
easily in limestone: but never, I think, in granite.  But I knew that
besides these cold springs which came out of the caves, there were hot
springs also, full of curious chemical salts, just below the very house
where I was in.  And when I went to look at them, I found that they came
out of the rock just where the limestone and the granite joined.  "Ah," I
said, "now I think I have Madam How's answer.  The lid of one of her
great steam boilers is rather shaky and cracked just here, because the
granite has broken and torn the limestone as it lifted it up; and here is
the hot water out of the boiler actually oozing out of the crack; and the
earthquake I heard last night was simply the steam rumbling and thumping
inside, and trying to get out."

And then, my dear child, I fell into a more serious mood.  I said to
myself, "If that stream had been a little, only a little stronger, or if
the rock above it had been only a little weaker, it would have been no
laughing matter then; the village might have been shaken to the ground;
the rocks hurled into the torrent; jets of steam and of hot water, mixed,
it may be, with deadly gases, have roared out of the riven ground; that
might have happened here, in short, which has happened and happens still
in a hundred places in the world, whenever the rocks are too weak to
stand the pressure of the steam below, and the solid earth bursts as an
engine boiler bursts when the steam within it is too strong."  And when
those thoughts came into my mind, I was in no humour to jest any more
about "young earthquakes," or "Madam How's boilers;" but rather to say
with the wise man of old, "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not
consumed."

Most strange, most terrible also, are the tricks which this underground
steam plays.  It will make the ground, which seems to us so hard and
firm, roll and rock in waves, till people are sea-sick, as on board a
ship; and that rocking motion (which is the most common) will often, when
it is but slight, set the bells ringing in the steeples, or make the
furniture, and things on shelves, jump about quaintly enough.  It will
make trees bend to and fro, as if a wind was blowing through them; open
doors suddenly, and shut them again with a slam; make the timbers of the
floors and roofs creak, as they do in a ship at sea; or give men such
frights as one of the dock-keepers at Liverpool got in the earthquake in
1863, when his watchbox rocked so, that he thought some one was going to
pitch him over into the dock.  But these are only little hints and
warnings of what it can do.  When it is strong enough, it will rock down
houses and churches into heaps of ruins, or, if it leaves them standing,
crack them from top to bottom, so that they must be pulled down and
rebuilt.

You saw those pictures of the ruins of Arica, about which our talk began;
and from them you can guess well enough for yourself what a town looks
like which has been ruined by an earthquake.  Of the misery and the
horror which follow such a ruin I will not talk to you, nor darken your
young spirit with sad thoughts which grown people must face, and ought to
face.  But the strangeness of some of the tricks which the earthquake
shocks play is hardly to be explained, even by scientific men.  Sometimes,
it would seem, the force runs round, making the solid ground eddy, as
water eddies in a brook.  For it will make straight rows of trees
crooked; it will twist whole walls round--or rather the ground on which
the walls stand--without throwing them down; it will shift the stones of
a pillar one on the other sideways, as if a giant had been trying to spin
it like a teetotum, and so screwed it half in pieces.  There is a story
told by a wise man, who saw the place himself, of the whole furniture of
one house being hurled away by an earthquake, and buried under the ruins
of another house; and of things carried hundreds of yards off, so that
the neighbours went to law to settle who was the true owner of them.
Sometimes, again, the shock seems to come neither horizontally in waves,
nor circularly in eddies, but vertically, that is, straight up from
below; and then things--and people, alas! sometimes--are thrown up off
the earth high into the air, just as things spring up off the table if
you strike it smartly enough underneath.  By that same law (for there is
a law for every sort of motion) it is that the earthquake shock sometimes
hurls great rocks off a cliff into the valley below.  The shock runs
through the mountain till it comes to the cliff at the end of it; and
then the face of the cliff, if it be at all loose, flies off into the
air.  You may see the very same thing happen, if you will put marbles or
billiard-balls in a row touching each other, and strike the one nearest
you smartly in the line of the row.  All the balls stand still, except
the last one, and that flies off.  The shock, like the earthquake shock,
has run through them all; but only the end one, which had nothing beyond
it but soft air, has been moved; and when you grow old, and learn
mathematics, you will know the law of motion according to which that
happens, and learn to apply what the billiard-balls have taught you, to
explain the wonders of an earthquake.  For in this case, as in so many
more, you must watch Madam How at work on little and common things, to
find out how she works in great and rare ones.  That is why Solomon says
that "a fool's eyes are in the ends of the earth," because he is always
looking out for strange things which he has not seen, and which he could
not understand if he saw; instead of looking at the petty commonplace
matters which are about his feet all day long, and getting from them
sound knowledge, and the art of getting more sound knowledge still.

Another terrible destruction which the earthquake brings, when it is
close to the seaside, is the wash of a great sea wave, such as swept in
last year upon the island of St. Thomas, in the West Indies; such as
swept in upon the coast of Peru this year.  The sea moans, and sinks
back, leaving the shore dry; and then comes in from the offing a mighty
wall of water, as high as, or higher than, many a tall house; sweeps far
inland, washing away quays and houses, and carrying great ships in with
it; and then sweeps back again, leaving the ships high and dry, as ships
were left in Peru this year.

Now, how is that wave made?  Let us think.  Perhaps in many ways.  But
two of them I will tell you as simply as I can, because they seem the
most likely, and probably the most common.

Suppose, as the earthquake shock ran on, making the earth under the sea
heave and fall in long earth-waves, the sea-bottom sank down.  Then the
water on it would sink down too, and leave the shore dry; till the sea-
bottom rose again, and hurled the water up again against the land.  This
is one way of explaining it, and it may be true.  For certain it is, that
earthquakes do move the bottom of the sea; and certain, too, that they
move the water of the sea also, and with tremendous force.  For ships at
sea during an earthquake feel such a blow from it (though it does them no
harm) that the sailors often rush upon deck fancying that they have
struck upon a rock; and the force which could give a ship, floating in
water, such a blow as that, would be strong enough to hurl thousands of
tons of water up the beach, and on to the land.

But there is another way of accounting for this great sea wave, which I
fancy comes true sometimes.

Suppose you put an empty india-rubber ball into water, and then blow into
it through a pipe.  Of course, you know, as the ball filled, the upper
side of it would rise out of the water.  Now, suppose there were a party
of little ants moving about upon that ball, and fancying it a great
island, or perhaps the whole world--what would they think of the ball's
filling and growing bigger?

If they could see the sides of the basin or tub in which the ball was,
and were sure that they did not move, then they would soon judge by them
that they themselves were moving, and that the ball was rising out of the
water.  But if the ants were so short-sighted that they could not see the
sides of the basin, they would be apt to make a mistake, because they
would then be like men on an island out of sight of any other land.  Then
it would be impossible further to tell whether they were moving up, or
whether the water was moving down; whether their ball was rising out of
the water, or the water was sinking away from the ball.  They would
probably say, "The water is sinking and leaving the ball dry."

Do you understand that?  Then think what would happen if you pricked a
hole in the ball.  The air inside would come hissing out, and the ball
would sink again into the water.  But the ants would probably fancy the
very opposite.  Their little heads would be full of the notion that the
ball was solid and could not move, just as our heads are full of the
notion that the earth is solid and cannot move; and they would say, "Ah!
here is the water rising again."  Just so, I believe, when the sea seems
to ebb away during the earthquake, the land is really being raised out of
the sea, hundreds of miles of coast, perhaps, or a whole island, at once,
by the force of the steam and gas imprisoned under the ground.  That
steam stretches and strains the solid rocks below, till they can bear no
more, and snap, and crack, with frightful roar and clang; then out of
holes and chasms in the ground rush steam, gases--often foul and
poisonous ones--hot water, mud, flame, strange stones--all signs that the
great boiler down below has burst at last.

Then the strain is eased.  The earth sinks together again, as the ball
did when it was pricked; and sinks lower, perhaps, than it was before:
and back rushes the sea, which the earth had thrust away while it rose,
and sweeps in, destroying all before it.

Of course, there is a great deal more to be said about all this: but I
have no time to tell you now.  You will read it, I hope, for yourselves
when you grow up, in the writings of far wiser men than I.  Or perhaps
you may feel for yourselves in foreign lands the actual shock of a great
earthquake, or see its work fresh done around you.  And if ever that
happens, and you be preserved during the danger, you will learn for
yourself, I trust, more about earthquakes than I can teach you, if you
will only bear in mind the simple general rules for understanding the
"how" of them which I have given you here.

But you do not seem satisfied yet?  What is it that you want to know?

Oh!  There was an earthquake here in England the other night, while you
were asleep; and that seems to you too near to be pleasant.  Will there
ever be earthquakes in England which will throw houses down, and bury
people in the ruins?

My dear child, I think you may set your heart at rest upon that point.  As
far as the history of England goes back, and that is more than a thousand
years, there is no account of any earthquake which has done any serious
damage, or killed, I believe, a single human being.  The little
earthquakes which are sometimes felt in England run generally up one line
of country, from Devonshire through Wales, and up the Severn valley into
Cheshire and Lancashire, and the south-west of Scotland; and they are
felt more smartly there, I believe, because the rocks are harder there
than here, and more tossed about by earthquakes which happened ages and
ages ago, long before man lived on the earth.  I will show you the work
of these earthquakes some day, in the tilting and twisting of the layers
of rock, and in the cracks (faults, as they are called) which run through
them in different directions.  I showed you some once, if you recollect,
in the chalk cliff at Ramsgate--two set of cracks, sloping opposite ways,
which I told you were made by two separate sets of earthquakes, long,
long ago, perhaps while the chalk was still at the bottom of a deep sea.
But even in the rocky parts of England the earthquake-force seems to have
all but died out.  Perhaps the crust of the earth has become too thick
and solid there to be much shaken by the gases and steam below.  In this
eastern part of England, meanwhile, there is but little chance that an
earthquake will ever do much harm, because the ground here, for thousands
of feet down, is not hard and rocky, but soft--sands, clays, chalk, and
sands again; clays, soft limestones, and clays again--which all act as
buffers to deaden the earthquake shocks, and deaden too the earthquake
noise.

And how?

Put your ear to one end of a soft bolster, and let some one hit the other
end.  You will hear hardly any noise, and will not feel the blow at all.
Put your ear to one end of a hard piece of wood, and let some one hit the
other.  You will hear a smart tap; and perhaps feel a smart tap, too.
When you are older, and learn the laws of sound, and of motion among the
particles of bodies, you will know why.  Meanwhile you may comfort
yourself with the thought that Madam How has (doubtless by command of
Lady Why) prepared a safe soft bed for this good people of Britain--not
that they may lie and sleep on it, but work and till, plant and build and
manufacture, and thrive in peace and comfort, we will trust and pray, for
many a hundred years to come.  All that the steam inside the earth is
likely to do to us, is to raise parts of this island (as Hartford Bridge
Flats were raised, ages ago, out of the old icy sea) so slowly, probably,
that no man can tell whether they are rising or not.  Or again, the steam-
power may be even now dying out under our island, and letting parts of it
sink slowly into the sea, as some wise friends of mine think that the
fens in Norfolk and Cambridgeshire are sinking now.  I have shown you
where that kind of work has gone on in Norfolk; how the brow of
Sandringham Hill was once a sea-cliff, and Dersingham Bog at its foot a
shallow sea; and therefore that the land has risen there.  How, again, at
Hunstanton Station there is a beach of sea-shells twenty feet above high-
water mark, showing that the land has risen there likewise.  And how,
farther north again, at Brancaster, there are forests of oak, and fir,
and alder, with their roots still in the soil, far below high-water mark,
and only uncovered at low tide; which is a plain sign that there the land
has sunk.  You surely recollect the sunken forest at Brancaster, and the
beautiful shells we picked up in its gullies, and the millions of live
Pholases boring into the clay and peat which once was firm dry land, fed
over by giant oxen, and giant stags likewise, and perhaps by the mammoth
himself, the great woolly elephant whose teeth the fishermen dredge up in
the sea outside?  You recollect that?  Then remember that as that Norfolk
shore has changed, so slowly but surely is the whole world changing
around us.  Hartford Bridge Flat here, for instance, how has it changed!
Ages ago it was the gravelly bottom of a sea.  Then the steam-power
underground raised it up slowly, through long ages, till it became dry
land.  And ages hence, perhaps, it will have become a sea-bottom once
more.  Washed slowly by the rain, or sunk by the dying out of the steam-
power underground, it will go down again to the place from whence it
came.  Seas will roll where we stand now, and new lands will rise where
seas now roll.  For all things on this earth, from the tiniest flower to
the tallest mountain, change and change all day long.  Every atom of
matter moves perpetually; and nothing "continues in one stay."  The solid-
seeming earth on which you stand is but a heaving bubble, bursting ever
and anon in this place and in that.  Only above all, and through all, and
with all, is One who does not move nor change, but is the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever.  And on Him, my child, and not on this bubble of an
earth, do you and I, and all mankind, depend.

But I have not yet told you why the Peruvians ought to have expected an
earthquake.  True.  I will tell you another time.




CHAPTER III--VOLCANOS


You want to know why the Spaniards in Peru and Ecuador should have
expected an earthquake.

Because they had had so many already.  The shaking of the ground in their
country had gone on perpetually, till they had almost ceased to care
about it, always hoping that no very heavy shock would come; and being,
now and then, terribly mistaken.

For instance, in the province of Quito, in the year 1797, from thirty to
forty thousand people were killed at once by an earthquake.  One would
have thought that warning enough: but the warning was not taken: and now,
this very year, thousands more have been killed in the very same country,
in the very same way.

They might have expected as much.  For their towns are built, most of
them, close to volcanos--some of the highest and most terrible in the
world.  And wherever there are volcanos there will be earthquakes.  You
may have earthquakes without volcanos, now and then; but volcanos without
earthquakes, seldom or never.

How does that come to pass?  Does a volcano make earthquakes?  No; we may
rather say that earthquakes are trying to make volcanos.  For volcanos
are the holes which the steam underground has burst open that it may
escape into the air above.  They are the chimneys of the great
blast-furnaces underground, in which Madam How pounds and melts up the
old rocks, to make them into new ones, and spread them out over the land
above.

And are there many volcanos in the world?  You have heard of Vesuvius, of
course, in Italy; and Etna, in Sicily; and Hecla, in Iceland.  And you
have heard, too, of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, and of Pele's
Hair--the yellow threads of lava, like fine spun glass, which are blown
from off its pools of fire, and which the Sandwich Islanders believed to
be the hair of a goddess who lived in the crater;--and you have read,
too, I hope, in Miss Yonge's _Book of Golden Deeds_, the noble story of
the Christian chieftainess who, in order to persuade her subjects to
become Christians also, went down into the crater and defied the goddess
of the volcano, and came back unhurt and triumphant.

But if you look at the map, you will see that there are many, many more.
Get Keith Johnston's Physical Atlas from the schoolroom--of course it is
there (for a schoolroom without a physical atlas is like a needle without
an eye)--and look at the map which is called "Phenomena of Volcanic
Action."

You will see in it many red dots, which mark the volcanos which are still
burning: and black dots, which mark those which have been burning at some
time or other, not very long ago, scattered about the world.  Sometimes
they are single, like the red dot at Otaheite, or at Easter Island in the
Pacific.  Sometimes the are in groups, or clusters, like the cluster at
the Sandwich Islands, or in the Friendly Islands, or in New Zealand.  And
if we look in the Atlantic, we shall see four clusters: one in poor half-
destroyed Iceland, in the far north, one in the Azores, one in the
Canaries, and one in the Cape de Verds.  And there is one dot in those
Canaries which we must not overlook, for it is no other than the famous
Peak of Teneriffe, a volcano which is hardly burnt out yet, and may burn
up again any day, standing up out of the sea more than 12,000 feet high
still, and once it must have been double that height.  Some think that it
is perhaps the true Mount Atlas, which the old Greeks named when first
they ventured out of the Straits of Gibraltar down the coast of Africa,
and saw the great peak far to the westward, with the clouds cutting off
its top; and said that it was a mighty giant, the brother of the Evening
Star, who held up the sky upon his shoulders, in the midst of the
Fortunate Islands, the gardens of the daughter of the Evening Star, full
of strange golden fruits; and that Perseus had turned him into stone,
when he passed him with the Gorgon's Head.

But you will see, too, that most of these red and black dots run in
crooked lines; and that many of the clusters run in lines likewise.

Look at one line: by far the largest on the earth.  You will learn a good
deal of geography from it.

The red dots begin at a place called the Terribles, on the east side of
the Bay of Bengal.  They run on, here and there, along the islands of
Sumatra and Java, and through the Spice Islands; and at New Guinea the
line of red dots forks.  One branch runs south-east, through islands
whose names you never heard, to the Friendly Islands, and to New Zealand.
The other runs north, through the Philippines, through Japan, through
Kamschatka; and then there is a little break of sea, between Asia and
America: but beyond it, the red dots begin again in the Aleutian Islands,
and then turn down the whole west coast of America, down from Mount Elias
(in what was, till lately, Russian America) towards British Columbia.
Then, after a long gap, there are one or two in Lower California (and we
must not forget the terrible earthquake which has just shaken San
Francisco, between those two last places); and when we come down to
Mexico we find the red dots again plentiful, and only too plentiful; for
they mark the great volcanic line of Mexico, of which you will read, I
hope, some day, in Humboldt's works.  But the line does not stop there.
After the little gap of the Isthmus of Panama, it begins again in Quito,
the very country which has just been shaken, and in which stand the huge
volcanos Chimborazo, Pasto, Antisana, Cotopaxi, Pichincha,
Tunguragua,--smooth cones from 15,000 to 20,000 feet high, shining white
with snow, till the heat inside melts it off, and leaves the cinders of
which the peaks are made all black and ugly among the clouds, ready to
burst in smoke and fire.  South of them again, there is a long gap, and
then another line of red dots--Arequiba, Chipicani, Gualatieri,
Atacama,--as high as, or higher than those in Quito; and this, remember,
is the other country which has just been shaken.  On the sea-shore below
those volcanos stood the hapless city of Arica, whose ruins we saw in the
picture.  Then comes another gap; and then a line of more volcanos in
Chili, at the foot of which happened that fearful earthquake of 1835
(besides many more) of which you will read some day in that noble book
_The Voyage of the Beagle_; and so the line of dots runs down to the
southernmost point of America.

What a line we have traced!  Long enough to go round the world if it were
straight.  A line of holes out of which steam, and heat, and cinders, and
melted stones are rushing up, perpetually, in one place and another.  Now
the holes in this line which are near each other have certainly something
to do with each other.  For instance, when the earth shook the other day
round the volcanos of Quito, it shook also round the volcanos of Peru,
though they were 600 miles away.  And there are many stories of
earthquakes being felt, or awful underground thunder heard, while
volcanos were breaking out hundreds of miles away.  I will give you a
very curious instance of that.

If you look at the West Indies on the map, you will see a line of red
dots runs through the Windward Islands: there are two volcanos in them,
one in Guadaloupe, and one in St. Vincent (I will tell you a curious
story, presently, about that last), and little volcanos (if they have
ever been real volcanos at all), which now only send out mud, in
Trinidad.  There the red dots stop: but then begins along the north coast
of South America a line of mountain country called Cumana, and Caraccas,
which has often been horribly shaken by earthquakes.  Now once, when the
volcano in St. Vincent began to pour out a vast stream of melted lava, a
noise like thunder was heard underground, over thousands of square miles
beyond those mountains, in the plains of Calabozo, and on the banks of
the Apure, more than 600 miles away from the volcano,--a plain sign that
there was something underground which joined them together, perhaps a
long crack in the earth.  Look for yourselves at the places, and you will
see that (as Humboldt says) it is as strange as if an eruption of Mount
Vesuvius was heard in the north of France.

So it seems as if these lines of volcanos stood along cracks in the rind
of the earth, through which the melted stuff inside was for ever trying
to force its way; and that, as the crack got stopped up in one place by
the melted stuff cooling and hardening again into stone, it was burst in
another place, and a fresh volcano made, or an old one re-opened.

Now we can understand why earthquakes should be most common round
volcanos; and we can understand, too, why they would be worst before a
volcano breaks out, because then the steam is trying to escape; and we
can understand, too, why people who live near volcanos are glad to see
them blazing and spouting, because then they have hope that the steam has
found its way out, and will not make earthquakes any more for a while.
But still that is merely foolish speculation on chance.  Volcanos can
never be trusted.  No one knows when one will break out, or what it will
do; and those who live close to them--as the city of Naples is close to
Mount Vesuvius--must not be astonished if they are blown up or swallowed
up, as that great and beautiful city of Naples may be without a warning,
any day.

For what happened to that same Mount Vesuvius nearly 1800 years ago, in
the old Roman times?  For ages and ages it had been lying quiet, like any
other hill.  Beautiful cities were built at its foot, filled with people
who were as handsome, and as comfortable, and (I am afraid) as wicked, as
people ever were on earth.  Fair gardens, vineyards, olive-yards, covered
the mountain slopes.  It was held to be one of the Paradises of the
world.  As for the mountain's being a burning mountain, who ever thought
of that?  To be sure, on the top of it was a great round crater, or cup,
a mile or more across, and a few hundred yards deep.  But that was all
overgrown with bushes and wild vines, full of boars and deer.  What sign
of fire was there in that?  To be sure, also, there was an ugly place
below by the sea-shore, called the Phlegraen fields, where smoke and
brimstone came out of the ground, and a lake called Avernus over which
poisonous gases hung, and which (old stories told) was one of the mouths
of the Nether Pit.  But what of that?  It had never harmed any one, and
how could it harm them?

So they all lived on, merrily and happily enough, till, in the year A.D.
79 (that was eight years, you know, after the Emperor Titus destroyed
Jerusalem), there was stationed in the Bay of Naples a Roman admiral,
called Pliny, who was also a very studious and learned man, and author of
a famous old book on natural history.  He was staying on shore with his
sister; and as he sat in his study she called him out to see a strange
cloud which had been hanging for some time over the top of Mount
Vesuvius.  It was in shape just like a pine-tree; not, of course, like
one of our branching Scotch firs here, but like an Italian stone pine,
with a long straight stem and a flat parasol-shaped top.  Sometimes it
was blackish, sometimes spotted; and the good Admiral Pliny, who was
always curious about natural science, ordered his cutter and went away
across the bay to see what it could be.  Earthquake shocks had been very
common for the last few days; but I do not suppose that Pliny had any
notion that the earthquakes and the cloud had aught to do with each
other.  However, he soon found out that they had, and to his cost.  When
he got near the opposite shore some of the sailors met him and entreated
him to turn back.  Cinders and pumice-stones were falling down from the
sky, and flames breaking out of the mountain above.  But Pliny would go
on: he said that if people were in danger, it was his duty to help them;
and that he must see this strange cloud, and note down the different
shapes into which it changed.  But the hot ashes fell faster and faster;
the sea ebbed out suddenly, and left them nearly dry, and Pliny turned
away to a place called Stabiae, to the house of his friend Pomponianus,
who was just going to escape in a boat.  Brave Pliny told him not to be
afraid, ordered his bath like a true Roman gentleman, and then went into
dinner with a cheerful face.  Flames came down from the mountain, nearer
and nearer as the night drew on; but Pliny persuaded his friend that they
were only fires in some villages from which the peasants had fled, and
then went to bed and slept soundly.  However, in the middle of the night
they found the courtyard being fast filled with cinders, and, if they had
not woke up the Admiral in time, he would never have been able to get out
of the house.  The earthquake shocks grew stronger and fiercer, till the
house was ready to fall; and Pliny and his friend, and the sailors and
the slaves, all fled into the open fields, amid a shower of stones and
cinders, tying pillows over their heads to prevent their being beaten
down.  The day had come by this time, but not the dawn--for it was still
pitch dark as night.  They went down to their boats upon the shore; but
the sea raged so horribly that there was no getting on board of them.
Then Pliny grew tired, and made his men spread a sail for him, and lay
down on it; but there came down upon them a rush of flames, and a
horrible smell of sulphur, and all ran for their lives.  Some of the
slaves tried to help the Admiral upon his legs; but he sank down again
overpowered with the brimstone fumes, and so was left behind.  When they
came back again, there he lay dead, but with his clothes in order and his
face as quiet as if he had been only sleeping.  And that was the end of a
brave and learned man--a martyr to duty and to the love of science.

But what was going on in the meantime?  Under clouds of ashes, cinders,
mud, lava, three of those happy cities were buried at once--Herculaneum,
Pompeii, Stabiae.  They were buried just as the people had fled from
them, leaving the furniture and the earthenware, often even jewels and
gold, behind, and here and there among them a human being who had not had
time to escape from the dreadful deluge of dust.  The ruins of
Herculaneum and Pompeii have been dug into since; and the paintings,
especially in Pompeii, are found upon the walls still fresh, preserved
from the air by the ashes which have covered them in.  When you are older
you perhaps will go to Naples, and see in its famous museum the
curiosities which have been dug out of the ruined cities; and you will
walk, I suppose, along the streets of Pompeii and see the wheel-tracks in
the pavement, along which carts and chariots rumbled 2000 years ago.
Meanwhile, if you go nearer home, to the Crystal Palace and to the
Pompeian Court, as it is called, you will see an exact model of one of
these old buried houses, copied even to the very paintings on the wells,
and judge for yourself, as far as a little boy can judge, what sort of
life these thoughtless, luckless people lived 2000 years ago.

And what had become of Vesuvius, the treacherous mountain?  Half or more
than half of the side of the old crater had been blown away, and what was
left, which is now called the Monte Somma, stands in a half circle round
the new cone and new crater which is burning at this very day.  True,
after that eruption which killed Pliny, Vesuvius fell asleep again, and
did not awake for 134 years, and then again for 269 years but it has been
growing more and more restless as the ages have passed on, and now hardly
a year passes without its sending out smoke and stones from its crater,
and streams of lava from its sides.

And now, I suppose, you will want to know what a volcano is like, and
what a cone, and a crater, and lava are?

What a volcano is like, it is easy enough to show you; for they are the
most simply and beautifully shaped of all mountains, and they are alike
all over the world, whether they be large or small.  Almost every volcano
in the world, I believe, is, or has been once, of the shape which you see
in the drawing opposite; even those volcanos in the Sandwich Islands, of
which you have often heard, which are now great lakes of boiling fire
upon flat downs, without any cone to them at all.  They, I believe, are
volcanos which have fallen in ages ago: just as in Java a whole burning
mountain fell in on the night of the 11th of August, in the year 1772.
Then, after a short and terrible earthquake, a bright cloud suddenly
covered the whole mountain.  The people who dwelt around it tried to
escape; but before the poor souls could get away the earth sunk beneath
their feet, and the whole mountain fell in and was swallowed up with a
noise as if great cannon were being fired.  Forty villages and nearly
3000 people were destroyed, and where the mountain had been was only a
plain of red-hot stones.  In the same way, in the year 1698, the top of a
mountain in Quito fell in in a single night, leaving only two immense
peaks of rock behind, and pouring out great floods of mud mixed with dead
fish; for there are underground lakes among those volcanos which swarm
with little fish which never see the light.

But most volcanos as I say, are, or have been, the shape of the one which
you see here.  This is Cotopaxi, in Quito, more than 19,000 feet in
height.  All those sloping sides are made of cinders and ashes, braced
together, I suppose, by bars of solid lava-stone inside, which prevent
the whole from crumbling down.  The upper part, you see, is white with
snow, as far down as a line which is 15,000 feet above the sea; for the
mountain is in the tropics, close to the equator, and the snow will not
lie in that hot climate any lower down.  But now and then the snow melts
off and rushes down the mountain side in floods of water and of mud, and
the cindery cone of Cotopaxi stands out black and dreadful against the
clear blue sky, and then the people of that country know what is coming.
The mountain is growing so hot inside that it melts off its snowy
covering; and soon it will burst forth with smoke and steam, and red-hot
stones and earthquakes, which will shake the ground, and roars that will
be heard, it may be, hundreds of miles away.

And now for the words cone, crater, lava.  If I can make you understand
those words, you will see why volcanos must be in general of the shape of
Cotopaxi.

Cone, crater, lava: those words make up the alphabet of volcano learning.
The cone is the outside of a huge chimney; the crater is the mouth of it.
The lava is the ore which is being melted in the furnace below, that it
may flow out over the surface of the old land, and make new land instead.

And where is the furnace itself?  Who can tell that?  Under the roots of
the mountains, under the depths of the sea; down "the path which no fowl
knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen: the lion's whelp hath
not trodden it, nor the fierce lion passed by it.  There He putteth forth
His hand upon the rock; He overturneth the mountain by the roots; He
cutteth out rivers among the rocks; and His eye seeth every precious
thing"--while we, like little ants, run up and down outside the earth,
scratching, like ants, a few feet down, and calling that a deep ravine;
or peeping a few feet down into the crater of a volcano, unable to guess
what precious things may lie below--below even the fire which blazes and
roars up through the thin crust of the earth.  For of the inside of this
earth we know nothing whatsoever: we only know that it is, on an average,
several times as heavy as solid rock; but how that can be, we know not.

So let us look at the chimney, and what comes out of it; for we can see
very little more.

Why is a volcano like a cone?

For the same cause for which a molehill is like a cone, though a very
rough one; and that the little heaps which the burrowing beetles make on
the moor, or which the ant-lions in France make in the sand, are all
something in the shape of a cone, with a hole like a crater in the
middle.  What the beetle and the ant-lion do on a very little scale, the
steam inside the earth does on a great scale.  When once it has forced a
vent into the outside air, it tears out the rocks underground, grinds
them small against each other, often into the finest dust, and blasts
them out of the hole which it has made.  Some of them fall back into the
hole, and are shot out again: but most of them fall round the hole, most
of them close to it, and fewer of them farther off, till they are piled
up in a ring round it, just as the sand is piled up round a beetle's
burrow.  For days, and weeks, and months this goes on; even it may be for
hundreds of years: till a great cone is formed round the steam vent,
hundreds or thousands of feet in height, of dust and stones, and of
cinders likewise.  For recollect, that when the steam has blown away the
cold earth and rock near the surface of the ground, it begins blowing out
the hot rocks down below, red-hot, white-hot, and at last actually
melted.  But these, as they are hurled into the cool air above, become
ashes, cinders, and blocks of stone again, making the hill on which they
fall bigger and bigger continually.  And thus does wise Madam How stand
in no need of bricklayers, but makes her chimneys build themselves.

And why is the mouth of the chimney called a crater?

Crater, as you know, is Greek for a cup.  And the mouth of these
chimneys, when they have become choked and stopped working, are often
just the shape of a cup, or (as the Germans call them) kessels, which
means kettles, or caldrons.  I have seen some of them as beautifully and
exactly rounded as if a cunning engineer had planned them, and had them
dug out with the spade.  At first, of course, their sides and bottom are
nothing but loose stones, cinders, slag, ashes, such as would be thrown
out of a furnace.  But Madam How, who, whenever she makes an ugly
desolate place, always tries to cover over its ugliness, and set
something green to grow over it, and make it pretty once more, does so
often and often by her worn-out craters.  I have seen them covered with
short sweet turf, like so many chalk downs.  I have seen them, too,
filled with bushes, which held woodcocks and wild boars.  Once I came on
a beautiful round crater on the top of a mountain, which was filled at
the bottom with a splendid crop of potatoes.  Though Madam How had not
put them there herself, she had at least taught the honest Germans to put
them there.  And often Madam How turns her worn-out craters into
beautiful lakes.  There are many such crater-lakes in Italy, as you will
see if ever you go there; as you may see in English galleries painted by
Wilson, a famous artist who died before you were born.  You recollect
Lord Macaulay's ballad, "The Battle of the Lake Regillus"?  Then that
Lake Regillus (if I recollect right) is one of these round crater lakes.
Many such deep clear blue lakes have I seen in the Eifel, in Germany; and
many a curious plant have I picked on their shores, where once the steam
blasted, and the earthquake roared, and the ash-clouds rushed up high
into the heaven, and buried all the land around in dust, which is now
fertile soil.  And long did I puzzle to find out why the water stood in
some craters, while others, within a mile of them perhaps, were perfectly
dry.  That I never found out for myself.  But learned men tell me that
the ashes which fall back into the crater, if the bottom of it be wet
from rain, will sometimes "set" (as it is called) into a hard cement; and
so make the bottom of the great bowl waterproof, as if it were made of
earthenware.

But what gives the craters this cup-shape at first?

Think--While the steam and stones are being blown out, the crater is an
open funnel, with more or less upright walls inside.  As the steam grows
weaker, fewer and fewer stones fall outside, and more and more fall back
again inside.  At last they quite choke up the bottom of the great round
hole.  Perhaps, too, the lava or melted rock underneath cools and grows
hard, and that chokes up the hole lower down.  Then, down from the round
edge of the crater the stones and cinders roll inward more and more.  The
rains wash them down, the wind blows them down.  They roll to the middle,
and meet each other, and stop.  And so gradually the steep funnel becomes
a round cup.  You may prove for yourself that it must be so, if you will
try.  Do you not know that if you dig a round hole in the ground, and
leave it to crumble in, it is sure to become cup-shaped at last, though
at first its sides may have been quite upright, like those of a bucket?
If you do not know, get a trowel and make your little experiment.

And now you ought to understand what "cone" and "crater" mean.  And more,
if you will think for yourself, you may guess what would come out of a
volcano when it broke out "in an eruption," as it is usually called.
First, clouds of steam and dust (what you would call smoke); then volleys
of stones, some cool, some burning hot; and at the last, because it lies
lowest of all, the melted rock itself, which is called lava.

And where would that come out?  At the top of the chimney?  At the top of
the cone?

No.  Madam How, as I told you, usually makes things make themselves.  She
has made the chimney of the furnace make itself; and next she will make
the furnace-door make itself.

The melted lava rises in the crater--the funnel inside the cone--but it
never gets to the top.  It is so enormously heavy that the sides of the
cone cannot bear its weight, and give way low down.  And then, through
ashes and cinders, the melted lava burrows out, twisting and twirling
like an enormous fiery earth-worm, till it gets to the air outside, and
runs off down the mountain in a stream of fire.  And so you may see (as
are to be seen on Vesuvius now) two eruptions at once--one of burning
stones above, and one of melted lava below.

And what is lava?

That, I think, I must tell you another time.  For when I speak of it I
shall have to tell you more about Madam How, and her ways of making the
ground on which you stand, than I can say just now.  But if you want to
know (as I dare say you do) what the eruption of a volcano is like, you
may read what follows.  I did not see it happen; for I never had the good
fortune of seeing a mountain burning, though I have seen many and many a
one which has been burnt--extinct volcanos, as they are called.

The man who saw it--a very good friend of mine, and a very good man of
science also--went last year to see an eruption on Vesuvius, not from the
main crater, but from a small one which had risen up suddenly on the
outside of it; and he gave me leave (when I told him that I was writing
for children) to tell them what he saw.

This new cone, he said, was about 200 feet high, and perhaps 80 or 100
feet across at the top.  And as he stood below it (it was not safe to go
up it) smoke rolled up from its top, "rosy pink below," from the glare of
the caldron, and above "faint greenish or blueish silver of indescribable
beauty, from the light of the moon."  But more--By good chance, the cone
began to send out, not smoke only, but brilliant burning stones.  "Each
explosion," he says, "was like a vast girandole of rockets, with a noise
(such as rockets would make) like the waves on a beach, or the wind
blowing through shrouds.  The mountain was trembling the whole time.  So
it went on for two hours and more; sometimes eight or ten explosions in a
minute, and more than 1000 stones in each, some as large as two bricks
end to end.  The largest ones mostly fell back into the crater; but the
smaller ones being thrown higher, and more acted on by the wind, fell in
immense numbers on the leeward slope of the cone" (of course, making it
bigger and bigger, as I have explained already to you), and of course, as
they were intensely hot and bright, making the cone look as if it too was
red-hot.  But it was not so, he says, really.  The colour of the stones
was rather "golden, and they spotted the black cone over with their
golden showers, the smaller ones stopping still, the bigger ones rolling
down, and jumping along just like hares."  "A wonderful pedestal," he
says, "for the explosion which surmounted it."  How high the stones flew
up he could not tell.  "There was generally one which went much higher
than the rest, and pierced upwards towards the moon, who looked calmly
down, mocking such vain attempts to reach her."  The large stones, of
course, did not rise so high; and some, he says, "only just appeared over
the rim of the cone, above which they came floating leisurely up, to show
their brilliant forms and intense white light for an instant, and then
subside again."

Try and picture that to yourselves, remembering that this was only a
little side eruption, of no more importance to the whole mountain than
the fall of a slate off the roof is of importance to the whole house.  And
then think how mean and weak man's fireworks, and even man's heaviest
artillery, are compared with the terrible beauty and terrible strength of
Madam How's artillery underneath our feet.

                 C
               / | \
              /  |  \
          A  /---+---\  E
            /    |    \
           /-----+-----\  E
Ground    /      | B    \      Ground
---------/       |       \------------
        |  D  |  | D |  D  |
      --+-----+--+---+-----+------
        |     |  |   |     |
                 |

Now look at this figure.  It represents a section of a volcano; that is,
one cut in half to show you the inside.  A is the cone of cinders.  B,
the black line up through the middle, is the funnel, or crack, through
which steam, ashes, lava, and everything else rises.  C is the crater
mouth.  D D D, which looks broken, are the old rocks which the steam
heaved up and burst before it could get out.  And what are the black
lines across, marked E E E?  They are the streams of lava which have
burrowed out, some covered up again in cinders, some lying bare in the
open air, some still inside the cone, bracing it together, holding it up.
Something like this is the inside of a volcano.




CHAPTER IV--THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF A GRAIN OF SOIL


Why, you ask, are there such terrible things as volcanos?  Of what use
can they be?

They are of use enough, my child; and of many more uses, doubt not, than
we know as yet, or ever shall know.  But of one of their uses I can tell
you.

They make, or help to make, divers and sundry curious things, from
gunpowder to your body and mine.

What?  I can understand their helping to make gunpowder, because the
sulphur in it is often found round volcanos; and I know the story of the
brave Spaniard who, when his fellows wanted materials for gunpowder, had
himself lowered in a basket down the crater of a South American volcano,
and gathered sulphur for them off the burning cliffs: but how can
volcanos help to make me?  Am I made of lava?  Or is there lava in me?

My child, I did not say that volcanos helped to make you.  I said that
they helped to make your body; which is a very different matter, as I beg
you to remember, now and always.  Your body is no more you yourself than
the hoop which you trundle, or the pony which you ride.  It is, like
them, your servant, your tool, your instrument, your organ, with which
you work: and a very useful, trusty, cunningly-contrived organ it is; and
therefore I advise you to make good use of it, for you are responsible
for it.  But you yourself are not your body, or your brain, but something
else, which we call your soul, your spirit, your life.  And that "you
yourself" would remain just the same if it were taken out of your body,
and put into the body of a bee, or of a lion, or any other body; or into
no body at all.  At least so I believe; and so, I am happy to say, nine
hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine people out
of every million have always believed, because they have used their human
instincts and their common sense, and have obeyed (without knowing it)
the warning of a great and good philosopher called Herder, that "The
organ is in no case the power which works by it;" which is as much as to
say, that the engine is not the engine-driver, nor the spade the
gardener.

There have always been, and always will be, a few people who cannot see
that.  They think that a man's soul is part of his body, and that he
himself is not one thing, but a great number of things.  They think that
his mind and character are only made up of all the thoughts, and
feelings, and recollections which have passed through his brain; and that
as his brain changes, he himself must change, and become another person,
and then another person again, continually.  But do you not agree with
them: but keep in mind wise Herder's warning that you are not to
"confound the organ with the power," or the engine with the driver, or
your body with yourself: and then we will go on and consider how a
volcano, and the lava which flows from it, helps to make your body.

Now I know that the Scotch have a saying, "That you cannot make broth out
of whinstones" (which is their name for lava).  But, though they are very
clever people, they are wrong there.  I never saw any broth in Scotland,
as far as I know, but what whinstones had gone to the making of it; nor a
Scotch boy who had not eaten many a bit of whinstone, and been all the
better for it.

Of course, if you simply put the whinstones into a kettle and boiled
them, you would not get much out of them by such rough cookery as that.
But Madam How is the best and most delicate of all cooks; and she knows
how to pound, and soak, and stew whinstones so delicately, that she can
make them sauce and seasoning for meat, vegetables, puddings, and almost
everything that you eat; and can put into your veins things which were
spouted up red-hot by volcanos, ages and ages since, perhaps at the
bottom of ancient seas which are now firm dry land.

This is very strange--as all Madam How's doings are.  And you would think
it stranger still if you had ever seen the flowing of a lava stream.

Out of a cave of slag and cinders in the black hillside rushes a golden
river, flowing like honey, and yet so tough that you cannot thrust a
stick into it, and so heavy that great stones (if you throw them on it)
float on the top, and are carried down like corks on water.  It is so hot
that you cannot stand near it more than a few seconds; hotter, perhaps,
than any fire you ever saw: but as it flows, the outside of it cools in
the cool air, and gets covered with slag and cinders, something like
those which you may see thrown out of the furnaces in the Black Country
of Staffordshire.  Sometimes these cling together above the lava stream,
and make a tunnel, through the cracks in which you may see the fiery
river rushing and roaring down below.  But mostly they are kept broken
and apart, and roll and slide over each other on the top of the lava,
crashing and clanging as they grind together with a horrid noise.  Of
course that stream, like all streams, runs towards the lower grounds.  It
slides down glens, and fills them up; down the beds of streams, driving
off the water in hissing steam; and sometimes (as it did in Iceland a few
years ago) falls over some cliff, turning what had been a water-fall into
a fire-fall, and filling up the pool below with blocks of lava suddenly
cooled, with a clang and roar like that of chains shaken or brazen
vessels beaten, which is heard miles and miles away.  Of course, woe to
the crops and gardens which stand in its way.  It crawls over them all
and eats them up.  It shoves down houses; it sets woods on fire, and
sends the steam and gas out of the tree-trunks hissing into the air.  And
(curiously enough) it does this often without touching the trees
themselves.  It flows round the trunks (it did so in a wood in the
Sandwich Islands a few years ago), and of course sets them on fire by its
heat, till nothing is left of them but blackened posts.  But the moisture
which comes out of the poor tree in steam blows so hard against the lava
round that it can never touch the tree, and a round hole is left in the
middle of the lava where the tree was.  Sometimes, too, the lava will
spit out liquid fire among the branches of the trees, which hangs down
afterwards from them in tassels of slag, and yet, by the very same means,
the steam in the branches will prevent the liquid fire burning them off,
or doing anything but just scorch the bark.

But I can tell you a more curious story still.  The lava stream, you must
know, is continually sending out little jets of gas and steam: some of it
it may have brought up from the very inside of the earth; most of it, I
suspect, comes from the damp herbage and damp soil over which it runs.  Be
that as it may, a lava stream out of Mount Etna, in Sicily, came once
down straight upon the town of Catania.  Everybody thought that the town
would be swallowed up; and the poor people there (who knew no better)
began to pray to St. Agatha--a famous saint, who, they say, was martyred
there ages ago--and who, they fancy, has power in heaven to save them
from the lava stream.  And really what happened was enough to make
ignorant people, such as they were, think that St. Agatha had saved them.
The lava stream came straight down upon the town wall.  Another foot, and
it would have touched it, and have begun shoving it down with a force
compared with which all the battering-rams that you ever read of in
ancient histories would be child's toys.  But lo and behold! when the
lava stream got within a few inches of the wall it stopped, and began to
rear itself upright and build itself into a wall beside the wall.  It
rose and rose, till I believe in one place it overtopped the wall and
began to curl over in a crest.  All expected that it would fall over into
the town at last: but no, there it stopped, and cooled, and hardened, and
left the town unhurt.  All the inhabitants said, of course, that St.
Agatha had done it: but learned men found out that, as usual Madam How
had done it, by making it do itself.  The lava was so full of gas, which
was continually blowing out in little jets, that when it reached the
wall, it actually blew itself back from the wall; and, as the wall was
luckily strong enough not to be blown down, the lava kept blowing itself
back till it had time to cool.  And so, my dear child, there was no
miracle at all in the matter; and the poor people of Catania had to thank
not St. Agatha, and any interference of hers, but simply Him who can
preserve, just as He can destroy, by those laws of nature which are the
breath of His mouth and the servants of His will.

But in many a case the lava does not stop.  It rolls on and on over the
downs and through the valleys, till it reaches the sea-shore, as it did
in Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands this very year.  And then it cools, of
course; but often not before it has killed the fish by its sulphurous
gases and heat, perhaps for miles around.  And there is good reason to
believe that the fossil fish which we so often find in rocks, perfect in
every bone, lying sometimes in heaps, and twisted (as I have seen them)
as if they had died suddenly and violently, were killed in this very way,
either by heat from lava streams, or else by the bursting up of gases
poisoning the water, in earthquakes and eruptions in the bottom of the
sea.  I could tell you many stories of fish being killed in thousands by
earthquakes and volcanos during the last few years.  But we have not time
to tell about everything.

And now you will ask me, with more astonishment than ever, what possible
use can there be in these destroying streams of fire?  And certainly, if
you had ever seen a lava stream even when cool, and looked down, as I
have done, at the great river of rough black blocks streaming away far
and wide over the land, you would think it the most hideous and the most
useless thing you ever saw.  And yet, my dear child, there is One who
told men to judge not according to the appearance, but to judge righteous
judgment.  He said that about matters spiritual and human: but it is
quite as true about matters natural, which also are His work, and all
obey His will.

Now if you had seen, as I have seen, close round the edges of these lava
streams, and sometimes actually upon them, or upon the great bed of dust
and ashes which have been hurled far and wide out of ancient volcanos,
happy homesteads, rich crops, hemp and flax, and wheat, tobacco, lucerne,
roots, and vineyards laden with white and purple grapes, you would have
begun to suspect that the lava streams were not, after all, such very bad
neighbours.  And when I tell you that volcanic soils (as they are
called), that is, soil which has at first been lava or ashes, are
generally the richest soils in the world--that, for instance (as some one
told me the other day), there is soil in the beautiful island of Madeira
so thin that you cannot dig more than two or three inches down without
coming to the solid rock of lava, or what is harder even, obsidian (which
is the black glass which volcanos sometimes make, and which the old
Mexicans used to chip into swords and arrows, because they had no
steel)--and that this soil, thin as it is, is yet so fertile, that in it
used to be grown the grapes of which the famous Madeira wine was
made--when you remember this, and when you remember, too, the Lothians of
Scotland (about which I shall have to say a little to you just now), then
you will perhaps agree with me, that Lady Why has not been so very wrong
in setting Madam How to pour out lava and ashes upon the surface of the
earth.

For see--down below, under the roots of the mountains, Madam How works
continually like a chemist in his laboratory, melting together all the
rocks, which are the bones and leavings of the old worlds.  If they
stayed down below there, they would be of no use; while they will be of
use up here in the open air.  For, year by year--by the washing of rain
and rivers, and also, I am sorry to say, by the ignorant and foolish
waste of mankind--thousands and millions of tons of good stuff are
running into the sea every year, which would, if it could be kept on
land, make food for men and animals, plants and trees.  So, in order to
supply the continual waste of this upper world, Madam How is continually
melting up the under world, and pouring it out of the volcanos like
manure, to renew the face of the earth.  In these lava rocks and ashes
which she sends up there are certain substances, without which men cannot
live--without which a stalk of corn or grass cannot grow.  Without
potash, without magnesia, both of which are in your veins and
mine--without silicates (as they are called), which give flint to the
stems of corn and of grass, and so make them stiff and hard, and able to
stand upright--and very probably without the carbonic acid gas, which
comes out of the volcanos, and is taken up by the leaves of plants, and
turned by Madam How's cookery into solid wood--without all these things,
and I suspect without a great many more things which come out of
volcanos--I do not see how this beautiful green world could get on at
all.

Of course, when the lava first cools on the surface of the ground it is
hard enough, and therefore barren enough.  But Madam How sets to work
upon it at once, with that delicate little water-spade of hers, which we
call rain, and with that alone, century after century, and age after age,
she digs the lava stream down, atom by atom, and silts it over the
country round in rich manure.  So that if Madam How has been a rough and
hasty workwoman in pumping her treasures up out of her mine with her
great steam-pumps, she shows herself delicate and tender and kindly
enough in giving them away afterwards.

Nay, even the fine dust which is sometimes blown out of volcanos is
useful to countries far away.  So light it is, that it rises into the sky
and is wafted by the wind across the seas.  So, in the year 1783, ashes
from the Skaptar Jokull, in Iceland, were carried over the north of
Scotland, and even into Holland, hundreds of miles to the south.

So, again, when in the year 1812 the volcano of St. Vincent, in the West
India Islands, poured out torrents of lava, after mighty earthquakes
which shook all that part of the world, a strange thing happened (about
which I have often heard from those who saw it) in the island of
Barbados, several hundred miles away.  For when the sun rose in the
morning (it was a Sunday morning), the sky remained more dark than any
night, and all the poor negroes crowded terrified out of their houses
into the streets, fancying the end of the world was come.  But a learned
man who was there, finding that, though the sun was risen, it was still
pitchy dark, opened his window, and found that it was stuck fast by
something on the ledge outside, and, when he thrust it open, found the
ledge covered deep in soft red dust; and he instantly said, like a wise
man as he was, "The volcano of St. Vincent must have broken out, and
these are the ashes from it."  Then he ran down stairs and quieted the
poor negroes, telling them not to be afraid, for the end of the world was
not coming just yet.  But still the dust went on falling till the whole
island, I am told, was covered an inch thick; and the same thing happened
in the other islands round.  People thought--and they had reason to think
from what had often happened elsewhere--that though the dust might hurt
the crops for that year, it would make them richer in years to come,
because it would act as manure upon the soil; and so it did after a few
years; but it did terrible damage at the time, breaking off the boughs of
trees and covering up the crops; and in St. Vincent itself whole estates
were ruined.  It was a frightful day, but I know well that behind that
How there was a Why for its happening, and happening too, about that very
time, which all who know the history of negro slavery in the West Indies
can guess for themselves, and confess, I hope, that in this case, as in
all others, when Lady Why seems most severe she is often most just and
kind.

Ah! my dear child, that I could go on talking to you of this for hours
and days!  But I have time now only to teach you the alphabet of these
matters--and, indeed, I know little more than the alphabet myself; but if
the very letters of Madam How's book, and the mere A, B, AB, of it, which
I am trying to teach you, are so wonderful and so beautiful, what must
its sentences be and its chapters?  And what must the whole book be like?
But that last none can read save He who wrote it before the worlds were
made.

But now I see you want to ask a question.  Let us have it out.  I would
sooner answer one question of yours than tell you ten things without your
asking.

Is there potash and magnesia and silicates in the soil here?  And if
there is, where did they come from?  For there are no volcanos in
England.

Yes.  There are such things in the soil; and little enough of them, as
the farmers here know too well.  For we here, in Windsor Forest, are on
the very poorest and almost the newest soil in England; and when Madam
How had used up all her good materials in making the rest of the island,
she carted away her dry rubbish and shot it down here for us to make the
best of; and I do not think that we and our forefathers have done so very
ill with it.  But where the rich part, or staple, of our soils came from
first it would be very difficult to say, so often has Madam How made, and
unmade, and re-made England, and sifted her materials afresh every time.
But if you go to the Lowlands of Scotland, you may soon see where the
staple of the soil came from there, and that I was right in saying that
there were atoms of lava in every Scotch boy's broth.  Not that there
were ever (as far as I know) volcanos in Scotland or in England.  Madam
How has more than one string to her bow, or two strings either; so when
she pours out her lavas, she does not always pour them out in the open
air.  Sometimes she pours them out at the bottom of the sea, as she did
in the north of Ireland and the south-west of Scotland, when she made the
Giant's Causeway, and Fingal's Cave in Staffa too, at the bottom of the
old chalk ocean, ages and ages since.  Sometimes she squirts them out
between the layers of rock, or into cracks which the earthquakes have
made, in what are called trap dykes, of which there are plenty to be seen
in Scotland, and in Wales likewise.  And then she lifts the earth up from
the bottom of the sea, and sets the rain to wash away all the soft rocks,
till the hard lava stands out in great hills upon the surface of the
ground.  Then the rain begins eating away those lava-hills likewise, and
manuring the earth with them; and wherever those lava-hills stand up,
whether great or small, there is pretty sure to be rich land around them.
If you look at the Geological Map of England and Ireland, and the red
spots upon it, which will show you where those old lavas are, you will
see how much of them there is in England, at the Lizard Point in
Cornwall, and how much more in Scotland and the north of Ireland.  In
South Devon, in Shropshire--with its beautiful Wrekin, and Caradoc, and
Lawley--in Wales, round Snowdon (where some of the soil is very rich),
and, above all, in the Lowlands of Scotland, you see these red marks,
showing the old lavas, which are always fertile, except the poor old
granite, which is of little use save to cut into building stone, because
it is too full of quartz--that is, flint.

Think of this the next time you go through Scotland in the railway,
especially when you get near Edinburgh.  As you run through the Lothians,
with their noble crops of corn, and roots, and grasses--and their great
homesteads, each with its engine chimney, which makes steam do the work
of men--you will see rising out of the plain, hills of dark rock,
sometimes in single knobs, like Berwick Law or Stirling Crag--sometimes
in noble ranges, like Arthur's Seat, or the Sidlaws, or the Ochils.  Think
what these black bare lumps of whinstone are, and what they do.  Remember
they are mines--not gold mines, but something richer still--food mines,
which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages and ages since,
as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and lifted them up, and pared
them away with her ice-plough and her rain-spade, and spread the stuff of
them over the wide carses round, to make in that bleak northern climate,
which once carried nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed
a great people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant
self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of
Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the ablest
little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the Greeks who
fought at Salamis.

Of those Greeks you have read, or ought to read, in Mr. Cox's _Tales of
the Persian War_.  Some day you will read of them in their own books,
written in their grand old tongue.  Remember that Lady Why made them, as
she has made the Scotch, by first preparing a country for them, which
would call out all their courage and their skill; and then by giving them
the courage and the skill to make use of the land where she had put them.

And now think what a wonderful fairy tale you might write for
yourself--and every word of it true--of the adventures of one atom of
Potash or some other Salt, no bigger than a needle's point, in such a
lava stream as I have been telling of.  How it has run round and round,
and will run round age after age, in an endless chain of change.  How it
began by being molten fire underground, how then it became part of a hard
cold rock, lifted up into a cliff, beaten upon by rain and storm, and
washed down into the soil of the plain, till, perhaps, the little atom of
mineral met with the rootlet of some great tree, and was taken up into
its sap in spring, through tiny veins, and hardened the next year into a
piece of solid wood.  And then how that tree was cut down, and its logs,
it may be, burnt upon the hearth, till the little atom of mineral lay
among the wood-ashes, and was shovelled out and thrown upon the field and
washed into the soil again, and taken up by the roots of a clover plant,
and became an atom of vegetable matter once more.  And then how, perhaps,
a rabbit came by, and ate the clover, and the grain of mineral became
part of the rabbit; and then how a hawk killed that rabbit, and ate it,
and so the grain became part of the hawk; and how the farmer shot the
hawk, and it fell perchance into a stream, and was carried down into the
sea; and when its body decayed, the little grain sank through the water,
and was mingled with the mud at the bottom of the sea.  But do its
wanderings stop there?  Not so, my child.  Nothing upon this earth, as I
told you once before, continues in one stay.  That grain of mineral might
stay at the bottom of the sea a thousand or ten thousand years, and yet
the time would come when Madam How would set to work on it again.  Slowly,
perhaps, she would sink that mud so deep, and cover it up with so many
fresh beds of mud, or sand, or lime, that under the heavy weight, and
perhaps, too, under the heat of the inside of the earth, that Mud would
slowly change to hard Slate Rock; and ages after, it may be, Madam How
might melt that Slate Rock once more, and blast it out; and then through
the mouth of a volcano the little grain of mineral might rise into the
open air again to make fresh soil, as it had done thousands of years
before.  For Madam How can manufacture many different things out of the
same materials.  She may have so wrought with that grain of mineral, that
she may have formed it into part of a precious stone, and men may dig it
out of the rock, or pick it up in the river-bed, and polish it, and set
it, and wear it.  Think of that--that in the jewels which your mother or
your sisters wear, or in your father's signet ring, there may be atoms
which were part of a live plant, or a live animal, millions of years ago,
and may be parts of a live plant or a live animal millions of years
hence.

Think over again, and learn by heart, the links of this endless chain of
change: Fire turned into Stone--Stone into Soil--Soil into Plant--Plant
into Animal--Animal into Soil--Soil into Stone--Stone into Fire again--and
then Fire into Stone again, and the old thing run round once more.

So it is, and so it must be.  For all things which are born in Time must
change in Time, and die in Time, till that Last Day of this our little
earth, in which,

   "Like to the baseless fabric of a vision,
   The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
   The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
   Yea, all things which inherit, shall dissolve,
   And, like an unsubstantial pageant faded,
   Leave not a rack behind."

So all things change and die, and so your body too must change and
die--but not yourself.  Madam How made your body; and she must unmake it
again, as she unmakes all her works in Time and Space; but you, child,
your Soul, and Life, and Self, she did not make; and over you she has no
power.  For you were not, like your body, created in Time and Space; and
you will endure though Time and Space should be no more: because you are
the child of the Living God, who gives to each thing its own body, and
can give you another body, even as seems good to Him.




CHAPTER V--THE ICE-PLOUGH


You want to know why I am so fond of that little bit of limestone, no
bigger than my hand, which lies upon the shelf; why I ponder over it so
often, and show it to all sensible people who come to see me?

I do so, not only for the sake of the person who gave it to me, but
because there is written on it a letter out of Madam How's alphabet,
which has taken wise men many a year to decipher.  I could not decipher
that letter when first I saw the stone.  More shame for me, for I had
seen it often before, and understood it well enough, in many another page
of Madam How's great book.  Take the stone, and see if you can find out
anything strange about it.

Well, it is only a bit of marble as big as my hand, that looks as if it
had been, and really has been, broken off by a hammer.  But when you look
again, you see there is a smooth scraped part on one edge, that seems to
have been rubbed against a stone.

Now look at that rubbed part, and tell me how it was done.

You have seen men often polish one stone on another, or scour floors with
a Bath brick, and you will guess at first that this was polished so: but
if it had been, then the rubbed place would have been flat: but if you
put your fingers over it, you will find that it is not flat.  It is
rolled, fluted, channelled, so that the thing or things which rubbed it
must have been somewhat round.  And it is covered, too, with very fine
and smooth scratches or grooves, all running over the whole in the same
line.  Now what could have done that?

Of course a man could have done it, if he had taken a large round stone
in his hand, and worked the large channellings with that, and then had
taken fine sand and gravel upon the points of his fingers, and worked the
small scratches with that.  But this stone came from a place where man
had, perhaps, never stood before,--ay, which, perhaps, had never seen the
light of day before since the world was made; and as I happen to know
that no man made the marks upon that stone, we must set to work and think
again for some tool of Madam How's which may have made them.

And now I think you must give up guessing, and I must tell you the answer
to the riddle.  Those marks were made by a hand which is strong and yet
gentle, tough and yet yielding, like the hand of a man; a hand which
handles and uses in a grip stronger than a giant's its own carving tools,
from the great boulder stone as large as this whole room to the finest
grain of sand.  And that is ICE.

That piece of stone came from the side of the Rosenlaui glacier in
Switzerland, and it was polished by the glacier ice.  The glacier melted
and shrank this last hot summer farther back than it had done for many
years, and left bare sheets of rock, which it had been scraping at for
ages, with all the marks fresh upon them.  And that bit was broken off
and brought to me, who never saw a glacier myself, to show me how the
marks which the ice makes in Switzerland are exactly the same as those
which the ice has made in Snowdon and in the Highlands, and many another
place where I have traced them, and written a little, too, about them in
years gone by.  And so I treasure this, as a sign that Madam How's ways
do not change nor her laws become broken; that, as that great philosopher
Sir Charles Lyell will tell you, when you read his books, Madam How is
making and unmaking the surface of the earth now, by exactly the same
means as she was making and unmaking ages and ages since; and that what
is going on slowly and surely in the Alps in Switzerland was going on
once here where we stand.

It is very difficult, I know, for a little boy like you to understand how
ice, and much more how soft snow, should have such strength that it can
grind this little stone, much more such strength as to grind whole
mountains into plains.  You have never seen ice and snow do harm.  You
cannot even recollect the Crimean Winter, as it was called then; and well
for you you cannot, considering all the misery it brought at home and
abroad.  You cannot, I say, recollect the Crimean Winter, when the Thames
was frozen over above the bridges, and the ice piled in little bergs ten
to fifteen feet high, which lay, some of them, stranded on the shores,
about London itself, and did not melt, if I recollect, until the end of
May.  You never stood, as I stood, in the great winter of 1837-8 on
Battersea Bridge, to see the ice break up with the tide, and saw the
great slabs and blocks leaping and piling upon each other's backs, and
felt the bridge tremble with their shocks, and listened to their horrible
grind and roar, till one got some little picture in one's mind of what
must be the breaking up of an ice-floe in the Arctic regions, and what
must be the danger of a ship nipped in the ice and lifted up on high,
like those in the pictures of Arctic voyages which you are so fond of
looking through.  You cannot recollect how that winter even in our little
Blackwater Brook the alder stems were all peeled white, and scarred, as
if they had been gnawed by hares and deer, simply by the rushing and
scraping of the ice,--a sight which gave me again a little picture of the
destruction which the ice makes of quays, and stages, and houses along
the shore upon the coasts of North America, when suddenly setting in with
wind and tide, it jams and piles up high inland, as you may read for
yourself some day in a delightful book called _Frost and Fire_.  You
recollect none of these things.  Ice and snow are to you mere playthings;
and you long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and
skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make your
stomach ache.  And I dare say you have said, like many another boy, on a
bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it would be always winter!"
You little knew for what you asked.  You little thought what the earth
would soon be like, if it were always winter,--if one sheet of ice on the
pond glued itself on to the bottom of the last sheet, till the whole pond
was a solid mass,--if one snow-fall lay upon the top of another snow-fall
till the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding
slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields, tearing the
trees up by their roots, burying gradually house, church, and village,
and making this place for a few thousand years what it was many thousand
years ago.  Good-bye then, after a very few winters, to bees, and
butterflies, and singing-birds, and flowers; and good-bye to all
vegetables, and fruit, and bread; good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes.
You would have, if you were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish
and seals, if any came near enough to be caught.  You would have to live
in a word, if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic
regions, and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times
when it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and
Finchampstead.  Oh no, my child: thank Heaven that it is not always
winter; and remember that winter ice and snow, though it is a very good
tool with which to make the land, must leave the land year by year if
that land is to be fit to live in.

I said that if the snow piled high enough upon the moor, it would come
down the glen in a few years through Coombs's Wood; and I said then you
would have a small glacier here--such a glacier (to compare small things
with great) as now comes down so many valleys in the Alps, or has come
down all the valleys of Greenland and Spitzbergen till they reach the
sea, and there end as cliffs of ice, from which great icebergs snap off
continually, and fall and float away, wandering southward into the
Atlantic for many a hundred miles.  You have seen drawings of such
glaciers in Captain Cook's Voyages; and you may see photographs of Swiss
glaciers in any good London print-shop; and therefore you have seen
almost as much about them as I have seen, and may judge for yourself how
you would like to live where it is always winter.

Now you must not ask me to tell you what a glacier is like, for I have
never seen one; at least, those which I have seen were more than fifty
miles away, looking like white clouds hanging on the gray mountain sides.
And it would be an impertinence--that means a meddling with things which
I have no business--to picture to you glaciers which have been pictured
so well and often by gentlemen who escape every year from their hard work
in town to find among the glaciers of the Alps health and refreshment,
and sound knowledge, and that most wholesome and strengthening of all
medicines, toil.

So you must read of them in such books as _Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers_,
and Mr. Willes's _Wanderings in the High Alps_, and Professor Tyndall's
different works; or you must look at them (as I just now said) in
photographs or in pictures.  But when you do that, or when you see a
glacier for yourself, you must bear in mind what a glacier means--that it
is a river of ice, fed by a lake of snow.  The lake from which it springs
is the eternal snow-field which stretches for miles and miles along the
mountain tops, fed continually by fresh snow-storms falling from the sky.
That snow slides off into the valleys hour by hour, and as it rushes down
is ground and pounded, and thawed and frozen again into a sticky paste of
ice, which flows slowly but surely till it reaches the warm valley at the
mountain foot, and there melts bit by bit.  The long black lines which
you see winding along the white and green ice of the glacier are the
stones which have fallen from the cliffs above.  They will be dropped at
the end of the glacier, and mixed with silt and sand and other stones
which have come down inside the glacier itself, and piled up in the field
in great mounds, which are called moraines, such as you may see and walk
on in Scotland many a time, though you might never guess what they are.

The river which runs out at the glacier foot is, you must remember, all
foul and milky with the finest mud; and that mud is the grinding of the
rocks over which the glacier has been crawling down, and scraping them as
it scraped my bit of stone with pebbles and with sand.  And this is the
alphabet, which, if you learn by heart, you will learn to understand how
Madam How uses her great ice-plough to plough down her old mountains, and
spread the stuff of them about the valleys to make rich straths of
fertile soil.  Nay, so immensely strong, because immensely heavy, is the
share of this her great ice-plough, that some will tell you (and it is
not for me to say that they are wrong) that with it she has ploughed out
all the mountain lakes in Europe and in North America; that such lakes,
for instance, as Ullswater or Windermere have been scooped clean out of
the solid rock by ice which came down these glaciers in old times.  And
be sure of this, that next to Madam How's steam-pump and her rain-spade,
her great ice-plough has had, and has still, the most to do with making
the ground on which we live.

Do I mean that there were ever glaciers here?  No, I do not.  There have
been glaciers in Scotland in plenty.  And if any Scotch boy shall read
this book, it will tell him presently how to find the marks of them far
and wide over his native land.  But as you, my child, care most about
this country in which you live, I will show you in any gravel-pit, or
hollow lane upon the moor, the marks, not of a glacier, which is an ice-
river, but of a whole sea of ice.

Let us come up to the pit upon the top of the hill, and look carefully at
what we see there.  The lower part of the pit of course is a solid rock
of sand.  On the top of that is a cap of gravel, five, six, ten feet
thick.  Now the sand was laid down there by water at the bottom of an old
sea; and therefore the top of it would naturally be flat and smooth, as
the sands at Hunstanton or at Bournemouth are; and the gravel, if it was
laid down by water, would naturally lie flat on it again: but it does
not.  See how the top of the sand is dug out into deep waves and pits,
filled up with gravel.  And see, too, how over some of the gravel you get
sand again, and then gravel again, and then sand again, till you cannot
tell where one fairly begins and the other ends.  Why, here are little
dots of gravel, six or eight feet down, in what looks the solid sand
rock, yet the sand must have been opened somehow to put the gravel in.

You say you have seen that before.  You have seen the same curious
twisting of the gravel and sand into each other on the top of Farley
Hill, and in the new cutting on Minley Hill; and, best of all, in the
railway cutting between Ascot and Sunningdale, where upon the top the
white sand and gravel is arranged in red and brown waves, and festoons,
and curlicues, almost like Prince of Wales's feathers.  Yes, that last is
a beautiful section of ice-work; so beautiful, that I hope to have it
photographed some day.

Now, how did ice do this?

Well, I was many a year before I found out that, and I dare say I never
should have found it out for myself.  A gentleman named Trimmer, who,
alas! is now dead, was, I believe, the first to find it out.  He knew
that along the coast of Labrador, and other cold parts of North America,
and on the shores, too, of the great river St. Lawrence, the stranded
icebergs, and the ice-foot, as it is called, which is continually forming
along the freezing shores, grub and plough every tide into the mud and
sand, and shove up before them, like a ploughshare, heaps of dirt; and
that, too, the ice itself is full of dirt, of sand and stones, which it
may have brought from hundreds of miles away; and that, as this
ploughshare of dirty ice grubs onward, the nose of the plough is
continually being broken off, and left underneath the mud; and that, when
summer comes, and the ice melts, the mud falls back into the place where
the ice had been, and covers up the gravel which was in the ice.  So,
what between the grubbing of the ice-plough into the mud, and the dirt
which it leaves behind when it melts, the stones, and sand, and mud upon
the shore are jumbled up into curious curved and twisted layers, exactly
like those which Mr. Trimmer saw in certain gravel-pits.  And when I
first read about that, I said, "And exactly like what I have been seeing
in every gravel-pit round here, and trying to guess how they could have
been made by currents of water, and yet never could make any guess which
would do."  But after that it was all explained to me; and I said,
"Honour to the man who has let Madam How teach him what she had been
trying to teach me for fifteen years, while I was too stupid to learn it.
Now I am certain, as certain as I can be of any earthly thing, that the
whole of these Windsor Forest Flats were ages ago ploughed and harrowed
over and over again, by ice-floes and icebergs drifting and stranding in
a shallow sea."

And if you say, my dear child, as some people will say, that it is like
building a large house upon a single brick to be sure that there was an
iceberg sea here, just because I see a few curlicues in the gravel and
sand--then I must tell you that there are sometimes--not often, but
sometimes--pages in Madam How's book in which one single letter tells you
as much as a whole chapter; in which if you find one little fact, and
know what it really means, it makes you certain that a thousand other
great facts have happened.  You may be astonished: but you cannot deny
your own eyes, and your own common sense.  You feel like Robinson Crusoe
when, walking along the shore of his desert island, he saw for the first
time the print of a man's foot in the sand.  How it could have got there
without a miracle he could not dream.  But there it was.  One footprint
was as good as the footprints of a whole army would have been.  A man had
been there; and more men might come.  And in fear of the savages--and if
you have read Robinson Crusoe you know how just his fears were--he went
home trembling and loaded his muskets, and barricaded his cave, and
passed sleepless nights watching for the savages who might come, and who
came after all.

And so there are certain footprints in geology which there is no
mistaking; and the prints of the ice-plough are among them.

For instance:--When they were trenching the new plantation close to
Wellington College station, the men turned up out of the ground a great
many Sarsden stones; that is, pieces of hard sugary sand, such as
Stonehenge is made of.  And when I saw these I said, "I suspect these
were brought here by icebergs:" but I was not sure, and waited.  As the
men dug on, they dug up a great many large flints, with bottle-green
coats.  "Now," I said, "I am sure.  For I know where these flints must
have come from."  And for reasons which would be too long to tell you
here, I said, "Some time or other, icebergs have been floating northward
from the Hog's Back over Aldershot and Farnborough, and have been trying
to get into the Vale of Thames by the slope at Wellington College
station; and they have stranded, and dropped these flints."  And I am so
sure of that, that if I found myself out wrong after all I should be at
my wit's end; for I should know that I was wrong about a hundred things
besides.

Or again, if you ever go up Deeside in Scotland, towards Balmoral, and
turn up Glen Muick, towards Alt-na-guisach, of which you may see a
picture in the Queen's last book, you will observe standing on your right
hand, just above Birk Hall, three pretty rounded knolls, which they call
the Coile Hills.  You may easily know them by their being covered with
beautiful green grass instead of heather.  That is because they are made
of serpentine or volcanic rock, which (as you have seen) often cuts into
beautiful red and green marble; and which also carries a very rich soil
because it is full of magnesia.  If you go up those hills, you get a
glorious view--the mountains sweeping round you where you stand, up to
the top of Lochnagar, with its bleak walls a thousand feet perpendicular,
and gullies into which the sun never shines, and round to the dark fir
forests of the Ballochbuie.  That is the arc of the bow; and the cord of
the bow is the silver Dee, more than a thousand feet below you; and in
the centre of the cord, where the arrow would be fitted in, stands
Balmoral, with its Castle, and its Gardens, and its Park, and pleasant
cottages and homesteads all around.  And when you have looked at the
beautiful amphitheatre of forest at your feet, and looked too at the
great mountains to the westward, and Benaun, and Benna-buird and Benna-
muicdhui, with their bright patches of eternal snow, I should advise you
to look at the rock on which you stand, and see what you see there.  And
you will see that on the side of the Coiles towards Lochnagar, and
between the knolls of them, are scattered streams, as it were, of great
round boulder stones--which are not serpentine, but granite from the top
of Lochnagar, five miles away.  And you will see that the knolls of
serpentine rock, or at least their backs and shoulders towards Lochnagar,
are all smoothed and polished till they are as round as the backs of
sheep, "roches moutonnees," as the French call ice-polished rocks; and
then, if you understand what that means, you will say, as I said, "I am
perfectly certain that this great basin between me and Lochnagar, which
is now 3000 feet deep of empty air was once filled up with ice to the
height of the hills on which I stand--about 1700 feet high--and that that
ice ran over into Glen Muick, between these pretty knolls, and covered
the ground where Birk Hall now stands."

And more:--When you see growing on those knolls of serpentine a few
pretty little Alpine plants, which have no business down there so low,
you will have a fair right to say, as I said, "The seeds of these plants
were brought by the ice ages and ages since from off the mountain range
of Lochnagar, and left here, nestling among the rocks, to found a fresh
colony, far from their old mountain home."

If I could take you with me up to Scotland,--take you, for instance,
along the Tay, up the pass of Dunkeld, or up Strathmore towards Aberdeen,
or up the Dee towards Braemar,--I could show you signs, which cannot be
mistaken, of the time when Scotland was, just like Spitzbergen or like
Greenland now, covered in one vast sheet of snow and ice from year's end
to year's end; when glaciers were ploughing out its valleys, icebergs
were breaking off the icy cliffs and floating out to sea; when not a
bird, perhaps, was to be seen save sea-fowl, not a plant upon the rocks
but a few lichens, and Alpine saxifrages, and such like--desolation and
cold and lifeless everywhere.  That ice-time went on for ages and for
ages; and yet it did not go on in vain.  Through it Madam How was
ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich farms
which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into
Sutherlandshire.  I could show you everywhere the green banks and knolls
of earth, which Scotch people call "kames" and "tomans"--perhaps brought
down by ancient glaciers, or dropped by ancient icebergs--now so smooth
and green through summer and through winter, among the wild heath and the
rough peat-moss, that the old Scots fancied, and I dare say Scotch
children fancy still, fairies dwelt inside.  If you laid your ear against
the mounds, you might hear the fairy music, sweet and faint, beneath the
ground.  If you watched the mound at night, you might see the fairies
dancing the turf short and smooth, or riding out on fairy horses, with
green silk clothes and jingling bells.  But if you fell asleep upon the
mounds, the fairy queen came out and carried you for seven years into
Fairyland, till you awoke again in the same place, to find all changed
around you, and yourself grown thin and old.

These are all dreams and fancies--untrue, not because they are too
strange and wonderful, but because they are not strange and wonderful
enough: for more wonderful sure than any fairy tale it is, that Madam How
should make a rich and pleasant land by the brute force of ice.

And were there any men and women in that old age of ice?  That is a long
story, and a dark one too; we will talk of it next time.




CHAPTER VI--THE TRUE FAIRY TALE


You asked if there were men in England when the country was covered with
ice and snow.  Look at this, and judge for yourself.

What is it? a piece of old mortar?  Yes.  But mortar which was made Madam
How herself, and not by any man.  And what is in it?  A piece of flint
and some bits of bone.  But look at that piece of flint.  It is narrow,
thin, sharp-edged: quite different in shape from any bit of flint which
you or I ever saw among the hundreds of thousands of broken bits of
gravel which we tread on here all day long; and here are some more bits
like it, which came from the same place--all very much the same shape,
like rough knives or razor blades; and here is a core of flint, the
remaining part of a large flint, from which, as you may see, blades like
those have been split off.  Those flakes of flint, my child, were split
off by men; even your young eyes ought to be able to see that.  And here
are other pieces of flint--pear-shaped, but flattened, sharp at one end
and left rounded at the other, which look like spear-heads, or
arrow-heads, or pointed axes, or pointed hatchets--even your young eyes
can see that these must have been made by man.  And they are, I may tell
you, just like the tools of flint, or of obsidian, which is volcanic
glass, and which savages use still where they have not iron.  There is a
great obsidian knife, you know, in a house in this very parish, which
came from Mexico; and your eye can tell you how like it is to these flint
ones.  But these flint tools are very old.  If you crack a fresh flint,
you will see that its surface is gray, and somewhat rough, so that it
sticks to your tongue.  These tools are smooth and shiny: and the edges
of some of them are a little rubbed from being washed about in gravel;
while the iron in the gravel has stained them reddish, which it would
take hundreds and perhaps thousands of years to do.  There are little
rough markings, too, upon some of them, which, if you look at through a
magnifying glass, are iron, crystallised into the shape of little sea-
weeds and trees--another sign that they are very very old.  And what is
more, near the place where these flint flakes come from there are no
flints in the ground for hundreds of miles; so that men must have brought
them there ages and ages since.  And to tell you plainly, these are
scrapers such as the Esquimaux in North America still use to scrape the
flesh off bones, and to clean the insides of skins.

But did these people (savages perhaps) live when the country was icy
cold?  Look at the bits of bone.  They have been split, you see,
lengthways; that, I suppose, was to suck the marrow out of them, as
savages do still.  But to what animal do the bones belong?  That is the
question, and one which I could not have answered you, if wiser men than
I am could not have told me.

They are the bones of reindeer--such reindeer as are now found only in
Lapland and the half-frozen parts of North America, close to the Arctic
circle, where they have six months day and six months night.  You have
read of Laplanders, and how they drive reindeer in their sledges, and
live upon reindeer milk; and you have read of Esquimaux, who hunt seals
and walrus, and live in houses of ice, lighted by lamps fed with the same
blubber on which they feed themselves.  I need not tell you about them.

Now comes the question--Whence did these flints and bones come?  They
came out of a cave in Dordogne, in the heart of sunny France,--far away
to the south, where it is hotter every summer than it was here even this
summer, from among woods of box and evergreen oak, and vineyards of rich
red wine.  In that warm land once lived savages, who hunted amid ice and
snow the reindeer, and with the reindeer animals stranger still.

And now I will tell you a fairy tale: to make you understand it at all I
must put it in the shape of a tale.  I call it a fairy tale, because it
is so strange; indeed I think I ought to call it the fairy tale of all
fairy tales, for by the time we get to the end of it I think it will
explain to you how our forefathers got to believe in fairies, and trolls,
and elves, and scratlings, and all strange little people who were said to
haunt the mountains and the caves.

Well, once upon a time, so long ago that no man can tell when, the land
was so much higher, that between England and Ireland, and, what is more,
between England and Norway, was firm dry land.  The country then must
have looked--at least we know it looked so in Norfolk--very like what our
moors look like here.  There were forests of Scotch fir, and of spruce
too, which is not wild in England now, though you may see plenty in every
plantation.  There were oaks and alders, yews and sloes, just as there
are in our woods now.  There was buck-bean in the bogs, as there is in
Larmer's and Heath pond; and white and yellow water-lilies, horn-wort,
and pond-weeds, just as there are now in our ponds.  There were wild
horses, wild deer, and wild oxen, those last of an enormous size.  There
were little yellow roe-deer, which will not surprise you, for there are
hundreds and thousands in Scotland to this day; and, as you know, they
will thrive well enough in our woods now.  There were beavers too: but
that must not surprise you, for there were beavers in South Wales long
after the Norman Conquest, and there are beavers still in the mountain
glens of the south-east of France.  There were honest little water-rats
too, who I dare say sat up on their hind legs like monkeys, nibbling the
water-lily pods, thousands of years ago, as they do in our ponds now.
Well, so far we have come to nothing strange: but now begins the fairy
tale.  Mixed with all these animals, there wandered about great herds of
elephants and rhinoceroses; not smooth-skinned, mind, but covered with
hair and wool, like those which are still found sticking out of the
everlasting ice cliffs, at the mouth of the Lena and other Siberian
rivers, with the flesh, and skin, and hair so fresh upon them, that the
wild wolves tear it off, and snarl and growl over the carcase of monsters
who were frozen up thousands of years ago.  And with them, stranger
still, were great hippopotamuses; who came, perhaps, northward in summer
time along the sea-shore and down the rivers, having spread hither all
the way from Africa; for in those days, you must understand, Sicily, and
Italy, and Malta--look at your map--were joined to the coast of Africa:
and so it may be was the rock of Gibraltar itself; and over the sea where
the Straits of Gibraltar now flow was firm dry land, over which hyaenas
and leopards, elephants and rhinoceroses ranged into Spain; for their
bones are found at this day in the Gibraltar caves.  And this is the
first chapter of my fairy tale.

Now while all this was going on, and perhaps before this began, the
climate was getting colder year by year--we do not know how; and, what is
more, the land was sinking; and it sank so deep that at last nothing was
left out of the water but the tops of the mountains in Ireland, and
Scotland, and Wales.  It sank so deep that it left beds of shells
belonging to the Arctic regions nearly two thousand feet high upon the
mountain side.  And so

      "It grew wondrous cold,
   And ice mast-high came floating by,
      As green as emerald."

But there were no masts then to measure the icebergs by, nor any ship nor
human being there.  All we know is that the icebergs brought with them
vast quantities of mud, which sank to the bottom, and covered up that
pleasant old forest-land in what is called boulder-clay; clay full of
bits of broken rock, and of blocks of stone so enormous, that nothing but
an iceberg could have carried them.  So all the animals were drowned or
driven away, and nothing was left alive perhaps, except a few little
hardy plants which clung about cracks and gullies in the mountain tops;
and whose descendants live there still.  That was a dreadful time; the
worst, perhaps, of all the age of Ice; and so ends the second chapter of
my fairy tale.

Now for my third chapter.  "When things come to the worst," says the
proverb, "they commonly mend;" and so did this poor frozen and drowned
land of England and France and Germany, though it mended very slowly.  The
land began to rise out of the sea once more, and rose till it was perhaps
as high as it had been at first, and hundreds of feet higher than it is
now: but still it was very cold, covered, in Scotland at least, with one
great sea of ice and glaciers descending down into the sea, as I said
when I spoke to you about the Ice-Plough.  But as the land rose, and grew
warmer too, while it rose, the wild beasts who had been driven out by the
great drowning came gradually back again.  As the bottom of the old icy
sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses, and weeds, and
shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, oxen--sometimes
the same species, sometimes slightly different ones--returned to France,
and then to England (for there was no British Channel then to stop them);
and with them came other strange animals, especially the great Irish elk,
as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns sometimes ten
feet across.  A pair of those horns with the skull you have seen
yourself, and can judge what a noble animal he must have been.  Enormous
bears came too, and hyaenas, and a tiger or lion (I cannot say which), as
large as the largest Bengal tiger now to be seen in India.

And in those days--we cannot, of course, exactly say when--there
came--first I suppose into the south and east of France, and then
gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland--creatures without
any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them, without horns or
tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite; the weakest you would
have thought of the beasts, and yet stronger than all the animals,
because they were Men, with reasonable souls.  Whence they came we cannot
tell, nor why; perhaps from mere hunting after food, and love of
wandering and being independent and alone.  Perhaps they came into that
icy land for fear of stronger and cleverer people than themselves; for we
have no proof, my child, none at all, that they were the first men that
trod this earth.  But be that as it may, they came; and so cunning were
these savage men, and so brave likewise, though they had no iron among
them, only flint and sharpened bones, yet they contrived to kill and eat
the mammoths, and the giant oxen, and the wild horses, and the reindeer,
and to hold their own against the hyaenas, and tigers, and bears, simply
because they had wits, and the dumb animals had none.  And that is the
strangest part to me of all my fairy tale.  For what a man's wits are,
and why he has them, and therefore is able to invent and to improve,
while even the cleverest ape has none, and therefore can invent and
improve nothing, and therefore cannot better himself, but must remain
from father to son, and father to son again, a stupid, pitiful,
ridiculous ape, while men can go on civilising themselves, and growing
richer and more comfortable, wiser and happier, year by year--how that
comes to pass, I say, is to me a wonder and a prodigy and a miracle,
stranger than all the most fantastic marvels you ever read in fairy
tales.

You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried in
many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England; but you
will find none here, for the gravel here was made (I am told) at the
beginning of the ice-time, before the north of England sunk into the sea,
and therefore long, long before men came into this land.  But most of
their remains are found in caves which water has eaten out of the
limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay.  In it,
and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate,
and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their
flint-weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with
round stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked
together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime.  These are in the
water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped
from the roof above and hardened into stone.  Of these caves and their
beautiful wonders I must tell you another day.  We must keep now to our
fairy tale.  But in these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not
only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I
suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory--drawings of elk, and bull,
and horse, and ibex--and one, which was found in France, of the great
mammoth himself, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a
lion's mane.  So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange
creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to
draw, and copy what you see, you know not why.  Remember that.  You like
to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell.  It is one
of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins,
dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when
he sat scratching on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he
hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious
human nature as you--that he was the kinsman of every painter and
sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works
of God.

Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left behind
upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there
"kjokken-moddings"--"kitchen-middens" as they would say in Scotland,
"kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South--and a very good
name for them that is; for they are made up of the shells of oysters,
cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other shore-shells besides, on
which those poor creatures fed; and mingled with them are broken bones of
beasts, and fishes, and birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling
stones; and here and there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals
in some rough way.  And that is nearly all we know about them; but this
we know from the size of certain of the shells, and from other reasons
which you would not understand, that these mounds were made an enormous
time ago, when the water of the Baltic Sea was far more salt than it is
now.

But what has all this to do with my fairy tale?  This:--

Suppose that these people, after all, had been fairies?

I am in earnest.  Of course, I do not mean that these folk could make
themselves invisible, or that they had any supernatural powers--any more,
at least, than you and I have--or that they were anything but savages;
but this I do think, that out of old stories of these savages grew up the
stories of fairies, elves, and trolls, and scratlings, and cluricaunes,
and ogres, of which you have read so many.

When stronger and bolder people, like the Irish, and the Highlanders of
Scotland, and the Gauls of France, came northward with their bronze and
iron weapons; and still more, when our own forefathers, the Germans and
the Norsemen, came, these poor little savages with their flint arrows and
axes, were no match for them, and had to run away northward, or to be all
killed out; for people were fierce and cruel in those old times, and
looked on every one of a different race from themselves as a natural
enemy.  They had not learnt--alas! too many have not learned it yet--that
all men are brothers for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord.  So these
poor savages were driven out, till none were left, save the little Lapps
up in the north of Norway, where they live to this day.

But stories of them, and of how they dwelt in caves, and had strange
customs, and used poisoned weapons, and how the elf-bolts (as their flint
arrow-heads are still called) belonged to them, lingered on, and were
told round the fire on winter nights and added to, and played with half
in fun, till a hundred legends sprang up about them, which used once to
be believed by grown-up folk, but which now only amuse children.  And
because some of these savages were very short, as the Lapps and Esquimaux
are now, the story grew of their being so small that they could make
themselves invisible; and because others of them were (but probably only
a few) very tall and terrible, the story grew that there were giants in
that old world, like that famous Gogmagog, whom Brutus and his Britons
met (so old fables tell), when they landed first at Plymouth, and fought
him, and threw him over the cliff.  Ogres, too--of whom you read in fairy
tales--I am afraid that there were such people once, even here in Europe;
strong and terrible savages, who ate human beings.  Of course, the
legends and tales about them became ridiculous and exaggerated as they
passed from mouth to mouth over the Christmas fire, in the days when no
one could read or write.  But that the tales began by being true any one
may well believe who knows how many cannibal savages there are in the
world even now.  I think that, if ever there was an ogre in the world, he
must have been very like a certain person who lived, or was buried, in a
cave in the Neanderthal, between Elberfeld and Dusseldorf, on the Lower
Rhine.  The skull and bones which were found there (and which are very
famous now among scientific men) belonged to a personage whom I should
have been very sorry to meet, and still more to let you meet, in the wild
forest; to a savage of enormous strength of limb (and I suppose of jaw)
likewise

   "like an ape,
   With forehead villainous low,"

who could have eaten you if he would; and (I fear) also would have eaten
you if he could.  Such savages may have lingered (I believe, from the old
ballads and romances, that they did linger) for a long time in lonely
forests and mountain caves, till they were all killed out by warriors who
wore mail-armour and carried steel sword, and battle-axe, and lance.

But had these people any religion?

My dear child, we cannot know, and need not know.  But we know this--that
God beholds all the heathen.  He fashions the hearts of them, and
understandeth all their works.  And we know also that He is just and
good.  These poor folks were, I doubt not, happy enough in their way; and
we are bound to believe (for we have no proof against it), that most of
them were honest and harmless enough likewise.  Of course, ogres and
cannibals, and cruel and brutal persons (if there were any among them),
deserved punishment--and punishment, I do not doubt, they got.  But, of
course, again, none of them knew things which you know; but for that very
reason they were not bound to do many things which you are bound to do.
For those to whom little is given, of them shall little be required.  What
their religion was like, or whether they had any religion at all, we
cannot tell.  But this we can tell, that known unto God are all His works
from the creation of the world; and that His mercy is over all His works,
and He hateth nothing that He has made.  These men and women, whatever
they were, were God's work; and therefore we may comfort ourselves with
the certainty that, whether or not they knew God, God knew them.

And so ends my fairy tale.

But is it not a wonderful tale?  More wonderful, if you will think over
it, than any story invented by man.  But so it always is.  "Truth," wise
men tell us, "is stranger than fiction."  Even a child like you will see
that it must be so, if you will but recollect who makes fiction, and who
makes facts.

Man makes fiction: he invents stories, pretty enough, fantastical enough.
But out of what does he make them up?  Out of a few things in this great
world which he has seen, and heard, and felt, just as he makes up his
dreams.  But who makes truth?  Who makes facts?  Who, but God?

Then truth is as much larger than fiction, as God is greater than man; as
much larger as the whole universe is larger than the little corner of it
that any man, even the greatest poet or philosopher, can see; and as much
grander, and as much more beautiful, and as much more strange.  For one
is the whole, and the other is one, a few tiny scraps of the whole.  The
one is the work of God; the other is the work of man.  Be sure that no
man can ever fancy anything strange, unexpected, and curious, without
finding if he had eyes to see, a hundred things around his feet more
strange, more unexpected, more curious, actually ready-made already by
God.  You are fond of fairy tales, because they are fanciful, and like
your dreams.  My dear child, as your eyes open to the true fairy tale
which Madam How can tell you all day long, nursery stories will seem to
you poor and dull.  All those feelings in you which your nursery tales
call out,--imagination, wonder, awe, pity, and I trust too, hope and
love--will be called out, I believe, by the Tale of all Tales, the true
"Marchen allen Marchen," so much more fully and strongly and purely, that
you will feel that novels and story-books are scarcely worth your
reading, as long as you can read the great green book, of which every bud
is a letter, and every tree a page.

Wonder if you will.  You cannot wonder too much.  That you might wonder
all your life long, God put you into this wondrous world, and gave you
that faculty of wonder which he has not given to the brutes; which is at
once the mother of sound science, and a pledge of immortality in a world
more wondrous even than this.  But wonder at the right thing, not at the
wrong; at the real miracles and prodigies, not at the sham.  Wonder not
at the world of man.  Waste not your admiration, interest, hope on it,
its pretty toys, gay fashions, fine clothes, tawdry luxuries, silly
amusements.  Wonder at the works of God.  You will not, perhaps, take my
advice yet.  The world of man looks so pretty, that you will needs have
your peep at it, and stare into its shop windows; and if you can, go to a
few of its stage plays, and dance at a few of its balls.  Ah--well--After
a wild dream comes an uneasy wakening; and after too many sweet things,
comes a sick headache.  And one morning you will awake, I trust and pray,
from the world of man to the world of God, and wonder where wonder is
due, and worship where worship is due.  You will awake like a child who
has been at a pantomime over night, staring at the "fairy halls," which
are all paint and canvas; and the "dazzling splendours," which are gas
and oil; and the "magic transformations," which are done with ropes and
pulleys; and the "brilliant elves," who are poor little children out of
the next foul alley; and the harlequin and clown, who through all their
fun are thinking wearily over the old debts which they must pay, and the
hungry mouths at home which they must feed: and so, having thought it all
wondrously glorious, and quite a fairy land, slips tired and stupid into
bed, and wakes next morning to see the pure light shining in through the
delicate frost-lace on the window-pane, and looks out over fields of
virgin snow, and watches the rosy dawn and cloudless blue, and the great
sun rising to the music of cawing rooks and piping stares, and says,
"This is the true wonder.  This is the true glory.  The theatre last
night was the fairy land of man; but this is the fairy land of God."




CHAPTER VII--THE CHALK-CARTS


What do you want to know about next?  More about the caves in which the
old savages lived,--how they were made, and how the curious things inside
them got there, and so forth.

Well, we will talk about that in good time: but now--What is that coming
down the hill?

Oh, only some chalk-carts.

Only some chalk-carts?  It seems to me that these chalk-carts are the
very things we want; that if we follow them far enough--I do not mean
with our feet along the public road, but with our thoughts along a road
which, I am sorry to say, the public do not yet know much about--we shall
come to a cave, and understand how a cave is made.  Meanwhile, do not be
in a hurry to say, "Only a chalk-cart," or only a mouse, or only a dead
leaf.  Chalk-carts, like mice, and dead leaves, and most other matters in
the universe are very curious and odd things in the eyes of wise and
reasonable people.  Whenever I hear young men saying "only" this and
"only" that, I begin to suspect them of belonging, not to the noble army
of sages--much less to the most noble army of martyrs,--but to the
ignoble army of noodles, who think nothing interesting or important but
dinners, and balls, and races, and back-biting their neighbours; and I
should be sorry to see you enlisting in that regiment when you grow up.
But think--are not chalk-carts very odd and curious things?  I think they
are.  To my mind, it is a curious question how men ever thought of
inventing wheels; and, again, when they first thought of it.  It is a
curious question, too, how men ever found out that they could make horses
work for them, and so began to tame them, instead of eating them, and a
curious question (which I think we shall never get answered) when the
first horse-tamer lived, and in what country.  And a very curious, and,
to me, a beautiful sight it is, to see those two noble horses obeying
that little boy, whom they could kill with a single kick.

But, beside all this, there is a question, which ought to be a curious
one to you (for I suspect you cannot answer it)--Why does the farmer take
the trouble to send his cart and horses eight miles and more, to draw in
chalk from Odiham chalk-pit?

Oh, he is going to put it on the land, of course.  They are chalking the
bit at the top of the next field, where the copse was grubbed.

But what good will he do by putting chalk on it?  Chalk is not rich and
fertile, like manure, it is altogether poor, barren stuff: you know that,
or ought to know it.  Recollect the chalk cuttings and banks on the
railway between Basingstoke and Winchester--how utterly barren they are.
Though they have been open these thirty years, not a blade of grass,
hardly a bit of moss, has grown on them, or will grow, perhaps, for
centuries.

Come, let us find out something about the chalk before we talk about the
caves.  The chalk is here, and the caves are not; and "Learn from the
thing that lies nearest you" is as good a rule as "Do the duty which lies
nearest you."  Let us come into the grubbed bit, and ask the farmer--there
he is in his gig.

Well, old friend, and how are you?  Here is a little boy who wants to
know why you are putting chalk on your field.

Does he then?  If he ever tries to farm round here, he will have to learn
for his first rule--No chalk, no wheat.

But why?

Why, is more than I can tell, young squire.  But if you want to see how
it comes about, look here at this freshly-grubbed land--how sour it is.
You can see that by the colour of it--some black, some red, some green,
some yellow, all full of sour iron, which will let nothing grow.  After
the chalk has been on it a year or two, those colours will have all gone
out of it; and it will turn to a nice wholesome brown, like the rest of
the field; and then you will know that the land is sweet, and fit for any
crop.  Now do you mind what I tell you, and then I'll tell you something
more.  We put on the chalk because, beside sweetening the land, it will
hold water.  You see, the land about here, though it is often very wet
from springs, is sandy and hungry; and when we drain the bottom water out
of it, the top water (that is, the rain) is apt to run through it too
fast: and then it dries and burns up; and we get no plant of wheat, nor
of turnips either.  So we put on chalk to hold water, and keep the ground
moist.

But how can these lumps of chalk hold water?  They are not made like
cups.

No: but they are made like sponges, which serves our turn better still.
Just take up that lump, young squire, and you'll see water enough in it,
or rather looking out of it, and staring you in the face.

Why! one side of the lump is all over thick ice.

So it is.  All that water was inside the chalk last night, till it froze.
And then it came squeezing out of the holes in the chalk in strings, as
you may see it if you break the ice across.  Now you may judge for
yourself how much water a load of chalk will hold, even on a dry summer's
day.  And now, if you'll excuse me, sir, I must be off to market.

Was it all true that the farmer said?

Quite true, I believe.  He is not a scientific man--that is, he does not
know the chemical causes of all these things; but his knowledge is sound
and useful, because it comes from long experience.  He and his
forefathers, perhaps for a thousand years and more, have been farming
this country, reading Madam How's books with very keen eyes,
experimenting and watching, very carefully and rationally; making
mistakes often, and failing and losing their crops and their money; but
learning from their mistakes, till their empiric knowledge, as it is
called, helps them to grow sometimes quite as good crops as if they had
learned agricultural chemistry.

What he meant by the chalk sweetening the land you would not understand
yet, and I can hardly tell you; for chemists are not yet agreed how it
happens.  But he was right; and right, too, what he told you about the
water inside the chalk, which is more important to us just now; for, if
we follow it out, we shall surely come to a cave at last.

So now for the water in the chalk.  You can see now why the chalk-downs
at Winchester are always green, even in the hottest summer: because Madam
How has put under them her great chalk sponge.  The winter rains soak
into it; and the summer heat draws that rain out of it again as invisible
steam, coming up from below, to keep the roots of the turf cool and moist
under the blazing sun.

You love that short turf well.  You love to run and race over the Downs
with your butterfly-net and hunt "chalk-hill blues," and "marbled
whites," and "spotted burnets," till you are hot and tired; and then to
sit down and look at the quiet little old city below, with the long
cathedral roof, and the tower of St. Cross, and the gray old walls and
buildings shrouded by noble trees, all embosomed among the soft rounded
lines of the chalk-hills; and then you begin to feel very thirsty, and
cry, "Oh, if there were but springs and brooks in the Downs, as there are
at home!"  But all the hollows are as dry as the hill tops.  There is not
a brook, or the mark of a watercourse, in one of them.  You are like the
Ancient Mariner in the poem, with

   "Water, water, every where,
   Nor any drop to drink."

To get that you must go down and down, hundreds of feet, to the green
meadows through which silver Itchen glides toward the sea.  There you
stand upon the bridge, and watch the trout in water so crystal-clear that
you see every weed and pebble as if you looked through air.  If ever
there was pure water, you think, that is pure.  Is it so?  Drink some.
Wash your hands in it and try--You feel that the water is rough, hard (as
they call it), quite different from the water at home, which feels as
soft as velvet.  What makes it so hard?

Because it is full of invisible chalk.  In every gallon of that water
there are, perhaps, fifteen grains of solid chalk, which was once inside
the heart of the hills above.  Day and night, year after year, the chalk
goes down to the sea; and if there were such creatures as
water-fairies--if it were true, as the old Greeks and Romans thought,
that rivers were living things, with a Nymph who dwelt in each of them,
and was its goddess or its queen--then, if your ears were opened to hear
her, the Nymph of Itchen might say to you--

So child, you think that I do nothing but, as your sister says when she
sings Mr. Tennyson's beautiful song,

   "I chatter over stony ways,
   In little sharps and trebles,
   I bubble into eddying bays,
   I babble on the pebbles."

Yes.  I do that: and I love, as the Nymphs loved of old, men who have
eyes to see my beauty, and ears to discern my song, and to fit their own
song to it, and tell how

   "'I wind about, and in and out,
   With here a blossom sailing,
   And here and there a lusty trout,
   And here and there a grayling,

   "'And here and there a foamy flake
   Upon me, as I travel
   With many a silvery waterbreak
   Above the golden gravel,

   "'And draw them all along, and flow
   To join the brimming river,
   For men may come and men may go,
   But I go on for ever.'"

Yes.  That is all true: but if that were all, I should not be let to flow
on for ever, in a world where Lady Why rules, and Madam How obeys.  I
only exist (like everything else, from the sun in heaven to the gnat
which dances in his beam) on condition of working, whether we wish it or
not, whether we know it or not.  I am not an idle stream, only fit to
chatter to those who bathe or fish in my waters, or even to give poets
beautiful fancies about me.  You little guess the work I do.  For I am
one of the daughters of Madam How, and, like her, work night and day, we
know not why, though Lady Why must know.  So day by day, and night by
night, while you are sleeping (for I never sleep), I carry, delicate and
soft as I am, a burden which giants could not bear: and yet I am never
tired.  Every drop of rain which the south-west wind brings from the West
Indian seas gives me fresh life and strength to bear my burden; and it
has need to do so; for every drop of rain lays a fresh burden on me.
Every root and weed which grows in every field; every dead leaf which
falls in the highwoods of many a parish, from the Grange and Woodmancote
round to Farleigh and Preston, and so to Brighton and the Alresford
downs;--ay, every atom of manure which the farmers put on the land--foul
enough then, but pure enough before it touches me--each of these, giving
off a tiny atom of what men call carbonic acid, melts a tiny grain of
chalk, and helps to send it down through the solid hill by one of the
million pores and veins which at once feed and burden my springs.  Ages
on ages I have worked on thus, carrying the chalk into the sea.  And ages
on ages, it may be, I shall work on yet; till I have done my work at
last, and levelled the high downs into a flat sea-shore, with beds of
flint gravel rattling in the shallow waves.

She might tell you that; and when she had told you, you would surely
think of the clumsy chalk-cart rumbling down the hill, and then of the
graceful stream, bearing silently its invisible load of chalk; and see
how much more delicate and beautiful, as well as vast and wonderful,
Madam How's work is than that of man.

But if you asked the nymph why she worked on for ever, she could not tell
you.  For like the Nymphs of old, and the Hamadryads who lived, in trees,
and Undine, and the little Sea-maiden, she would have no soul; no reason;
no power to say why.

It is for you, who are a reasonable being, to guess why: or at least
listen to me if I guess for you, and say, perhaps--I can only say
perhaps--that chalk may be going to make layers of rich marl in the sea
between England and France; and those marl-beds may be upheaved and grow
into dry land, and be ploughed, and sowed, and reaped by a wiser race of
men, in a better-ordered world than this: or the chalk may have even a
nobler destiny before it.  That may happen to it, which has happened
already to many a grain of lime.  It may be carried thousands of miles
away to help in building up a coral reef (what that is I must tell you
afterwards).  That coral reef may harden into limestone beds.  Those beds
may be covered up, pressed, and, it may be, heated, till they crystallise
into white marble: and out of it fairer statues be carved, and grander
temples built, than the world has ever yet seen.

And if that is not the reason why the chalk is being sent into the sea,
then there is another reason, and probably a far better one.  For, as I
told you at first, Lady Why's intentions are far wiser and better than
our fancies; and she--like Him whom she obeys--is able to do exceeding
abundantly, beyond all that we can ask or think.

But you will say now that we have followed the chalk-cart a long way,
without coming to the cave.

You are wrong.  We have come to the very mouth of the cave.  All we have
to do is to say--not "Open Sesame," like Ali Baba in the tale of the
Forty Thieves--but some word or two which Madam Why will teach us, and
forthwith a hill will open, and we shall walk in, and behold rivers and
cascades underground, stalactite pillars and stalagmite statues, and all
the wonders of the grottoes of Adelsberg, Antiparos, or Kentucky.

Am I joking?  Yes, and yet no; for you know that when I joke I am usually
most in earnest.  At least, I am now.

But there are no caves in chalk?

No, not that I ever heard of.  There are, though, in limestone, which is
only a harder kind of chalk.  Madam How could turn this chalk into hard
limestone, I believe, even now; and in more ways than one: but in ways
which would not be very comfortable or profitable for us Southern folk
who live on it.  I am afraid that--what between squeezing and heating--she
would flatten us all out into phosphatic fossils, about an inch thick;
and turn Winchester city into a "breccia" which would puzzle geologists a
hundred thousand years hence.  So we will hope that she will leave our
chalk downs for the Itchen to wash gently away, while we talk about
caves, and how Madam How scoops them out by water underground, just in
the same way, only more roughly, as she melts the chalk.

Suppose, then, that these hills, instead of being soft, spongy chalk,
were all hard limestone marble, like that of which the font in the church
is made.  Then the rainwater, instead of sinking through the chalk as
now, would run over the ground down-hill, and if it came to a crack (a
fault, as it is called) it would run down between the rock; and as it ran
it would eat that hole wider and wider year by year, and make a swallow-
hole--such as you may see in plenty if you ever go up Whernside, or any
of the high hills in Yorkshire--unfathomable pits in the green turf, in
which you may hear the water tinkling and trickling far, far underground.

And now, before we go a step farther, you may understand, why the bones
of animals are so often found in limestone caves.  Down such
swallow-holes how many beasts must fall: either in hurry and fright, when
hunted by lions and bears and such cruel beasts; or more often still in
time of snow, when the holes are covered with drift; or, again, if they
died on the open hill-sides, their bones might be washed in, in floods,
along with mud and stones, and buried with them in the cave below; and
beside that, lions and bears and hyaenas might live in the caves below,
as we know they did in some caves, and drag in bones through the caves'
mouths; or, again, savages might live in that cave, and bring in animals
to eat, like the wild beasts; and so those bones might be mixed up, as we
know they were, with things which the savages had left behind--like flint
tools or beads; and then the whole would be hardened, by the dripping of
the limestone water, into a paste of breccia just like this in my drawer.
But the bones of the savages themselves you would seldom or never find
mixed in it--unless some one had fallen in by accident from above.  And
why?  (For there is a Why? to that question: and not merely a How?)
Simply because they were men; and because God has put into the hearts of
all men, even of the lowest savages, some sort of reverence for those who
are gone; and has taught them to bury, or in some other way take care of,
their bones.

But how is the swallow-hole sure to end in a cave?

Because it cannot help making a cave for itself if it has time.

Think: and you will see that it must be so.  For that water must run
somewhere; and so it eats its way out between the beds of the rock,
making underground galleries, and at last caves and lofty halls.  For it
always eats, remember, at the bottom of its channel, leaving the roof
alone.  So it eats, and eats, more in some places and less in others,
according as the stone is harder or softer, and according to the
different direction of the rock-beds (what we call their dip and strike);
till at last it makes one of those wonderful caverns about which you are
so fond of reading--such a cave as there actually is in the rocks of the
mountain of Whernside, fed by the swallow-holes around the mountain-top;
a cave hundreds of yards long, with halls, and lakes, and waterfalls, and
curtains and festoons of stalactite which have dripped from the roof, and
pillars of stalagmite which have been built up on the floor below.  These
stalactites (those tell me who have seen them) are among the most
beautiful of all Madam How's work; sometimes like branches of roses or of
grapes; sometimes like statues; sometimes like delicate curtains, and I
know not what other beautiful shapes.  I have never seen them, I am sorry
to say, and therefore I cannot describe them.  But they are all made in
the same way; just in the same way as those little straight stalactites
which you may have seen hanging, like icicles, in vaulted cellars, or
under the arches of a bridge.  The water melts more lime than it can
carry, and drops some of it again, making fresh limestone grain by grain
as it drips from the roof above; and fresh limestone again where it
splashes on the floor below: till if it dripped long enough, the
stalactite hanging from above would meet the stalagmite rising from
below, and join in one straight round white graceful shaft, which would
seem (but only seem) to support the roof of the cave.  And out of that
cave--though not always out of the mouth of it--will run a stream of
water, which seems to you clear as crystal, though it is actually, like
the Itchen at Winchester, full of lime; so full of lime, that it makes
beds of fresh limestone, which are called travertine--which you may see
in Italy, and Greece, and Asia Minor: or perhaps it petrifies, as you
call it, the weeds in its bed, like that dropping-well at Knaresborough,
of which you have often seen a picture.  And the cause is this: the water
is so full of lime, that it is forced to throw away some of it upon
everything it touches, and so incrusts with stone--though it does not
turn to stone--almost anything you put in it.  You have seen, or ought to
have seen, petrified moss and birds' nests and such things from
Knaresborough Well: and now you know a little, though only a very little,
of how the pretty toys are made.

Now if you can imagine for yourself (though I suppose a little boy
cannot) the amount of lime which one of these subterranean rivers would
carry away, gnawing underground centuries after centuries, day and night,
summer and winter, then you will not be surprised at the enormous size of
caverns which may be seen in different parts of the world--but always, I
believe, in limestone rock.  You would not be surprised (though you would
admire them) at the caverns of Adelsberg, in Carniola (in the south of
Austria, near the top of the Adriatic), which runs, I believe, for miles
in length; and in the lakes of which, in darkness from its birth until
its death, lives that strange beast, the Proteus a sort of long newt
which never comes to perfection--I suppose for want of the genial
sunlight which makes all things grow.  But he is blind; and more, he
keeps all his life the same feathery gills which newts have when they are
babies, and which we have so often looked at through the microscope, to
see the blood-globules run round and round inside.  You would not wonder,
either, at the Czirknitz Lake, near the same place, which at certain
times of the year vanishes suddenly through chasms under water, sucking
the fish down with it; and after a certain time boils suddenly up again
from the depths, bringing back with it the fish, who have been swimming
comfortably all the time in a subterranean lake; and bringing back, too
(and, extraordinary as this story is, there is good reason to believe it
true), live wild ducks who went down small and unfledged, and come back
full-grown and fat, with water-weeds and small fish in their stomachs,
showing they have had plenty to feed on underground.  But--and this is
the strangest part of the story, if true--they come up unfledged just as
they went down, and are moreover blind from having been so long in
darkness.  After a while, however, folks say their eyes get right, their
feathers grow, and they fly away like other birds.

Neither would you be surprised (if you recollect that Madam How is a very
old lady indeed, and that some of her work is very old likewise) at that
Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, the largest cave in the known world, through
which you may walk nearly ten miles on end, and in which a hundred miles
of gallery have been explored already, and yet no end found to the cave.
In it (the guides will tell you) there are "226 avenues, 47 domes, 8
cataracts, 23 pits, and several rivers;" and if that fact is not very
interesting to you (as it certainly is not to me) I will tell you
something which ought to interest you: that this cave is so immensely old
that various kinds of little animals, who have settled themselves in the
outer parts of it, have had time to change their shape, and to become
quite blind; so that blind fathers and mothers have blind children,
generation after generation.

There are blind rats there, with large shining eyes which cannot
see--blind landcrabs, who have the foot-stalks of their eyes (you may see
them in any crab) still left; but the eyes which should be on the top of
them are gone.  There are blind fish, too, in the cave, and blind
insects; for, if they have no use for their eyes in the dark, why should
Madam How take the trouble to finish them off?

One more cave I must tell you of, to show you how old some caves must be,
and then I must stop; and that is the cave of Caripe, in Venezuela, which
is the most northerly part of South America.  There, in the face of a
limestone cliff, crested with enormous flowering trees, and festooned
with those lovely creepers of which you have seen a few small ones in
hothouses, there opens an arch as big as the west front of Winchester
Cathedral, and runs straight in like a cathedral nave for more than 1400
feet.  Out of it runs a stream; and along the banks of that stream, as
far as the sunlight strikes in, grow wild bananas, and palms, and lords
and ladies (as you call them), which are not, like ours, one foot, bu

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