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 fo