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 und