d 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 ha