Hullo! hi! wake up. Jump out of bed, and come to the window, and see where you are.
What a wonderful place!
So it is: though it is only poor old Ireland. Don't you recollect that when we started I told you we were going to Ireland, and through it to the World's End; and here we are now safe at the end of the old world, and beyond us the great Atlantic, and beyond that again, thousands of miles away, the new world, which will be rich and prosperous, civilised and noble, thousands of years hence, when this old world, it may be, will be dead, and little children there will be reading in their history books of Ancient England and of Ancient France, as you now read of Greece and Rome.
But what a wonderful place it is! What are those great green things standing up in the sky, all over purple ribs and bars, with their tops hid in the clouds?
Those are mountains; the bones of some old world, whose poor bare sides Madam How is trying to cover with rich green grass.
And how far off are they?
How I should like to walk up to the top of that one which looks quite close.
You will find it a long walk up there; three miles, I dare say, over black bogs and banks of rock, and up corries and cliffs which you could not climb. There are plenty of cows on that mountain: and yet they look so small, you could not see them, nor I either, without a glass. That long white streak, zigzagging down the mountain side, is a roaring cataract of foam five hundred feet high, full now with last night's rain; but by this afternoon it will have dwindled to a little thread; and to-morrow, when you get up, if no more rain has come down, it will be gone. Madam How works here among the mountains swiftly and hugely, and sometimes terribly enough; as you shall see when you have had your breakfast, and come down to the bridge with me.
But what a beautiful place it is! Flowers and woods and a lawn; and what is that great smooth patch in the lawn just under the window?
Is it an empty flower-bed?
Ah, thereby hangs a strange tale. We will go and look at it after breakfast, and then you shall see with your own eyes one of the wonders which I have been telling you of.
And what is that shining between the trees?
Water.
Is it a lake?
Not a lake, though there are plenty round here; that is salt water, not fresh. Look away to the right, and you see it through the opening of the woods again and again: and now look above the woods. You see a faint blue line, and gray and purple lumps like clouds, which rest upon it far away. That, child, is the great Atlantic Ocean, and those are islands in the far west. The water which washes the bottom of the lawn was but a few months ago pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bahamas and Florida, and swept away here as the great ocean river of warm water which we call the Gulf Stream, bringing with it out of the open ocean the shoals of mackerel, and the porpoises and whales which feed upon them. Some fine afternoon we will run down the bay and catch strange fishes, such as you never saw before, and very likely see a living whale.
What? such a whale as they get whalebone from, and which eats sea- moths?
No, they live far north, in the Arctic circle; these are grampuses, and bottle-noses, which feed on fish; not so big as the right whales, but quite big enough to astonish you, if one comes up and blows close to the boat. Get yourself dressed and come down, and then we will go out; we shall have plenty to see and talk of at every step.
Now, you have finished your breakfast at last, so come along, and we shall see what we shall see. First run out across the gravel, and scramble up that bank of lawn, and you will see what you fancied was an empty flower-bed.
Why, it is all hard rock.
Ah, you are come into the land of rocks now: out of the land of sand and gravel; out of a soft young corner of the world into a very hard, old, weather-beaten corner; and you will see rocks enough, and too many for the poor farmers, before you go home again.
But how beautifully smooth and flat the rock is: and yet it is all rounded.
What is it like?
Like--like the half of a shell.
Not badly said, but think again.
Like--like--I know what it is like. Like the back of some great monster peeping up through the turf.
You have got it. Such rocks as these are called in Switzerland "roches moutonnees," because they are, people fancy, like sheep's backs. Now look at the cracks and layers in it. They run across the stone; they have nothing to do with the shape of it. You see that?
Yes: but here are cracks running across them, all along the stone, till the turf hides them.
Look at them again; they are no cracks; they do not go into the stone.
I see. They are scratched; something like those on the elder-stem at home, where the cats sharpen their claws. But it would take a big cat to make them.
Do you recollect what I told you of Madam How's hand, more flexible than any hand of man, and yet strong enough to grind the mountains into paste?
I know. Ice! ice! ice! But are these really ice-marks?
Child, on the place where we now stand, over rich lawns, and warm woods, and shining lochs, lay once on a time hundreds, it may be thousands, of feet of solid ice, crawling off yonder mountain-tops into the ocean there outside; and this is one of its tracks. See how the scratches all point straight down the valley, and straight out to sea. Those mountains are 2000 feet high: but they were much higher once; for the ice has planed the tops off them. Then, it seems to me, the ice sank, and left the mountains standing out of it about half their height, and at that level it stayed, till it had planed down all those lower moors of smooth bare rock between us and the Western ocean; and then it sank again, and dwindled back, leaving moraines (that is, heaps of dirt and stones) all up these valleys here and there, till at the last it melted all away, and poor old Ireland became fit to live in again.