, well, yes, just so, h'm!" said the Captain, looking very wise;
"that is exactly the pint that I want to know myself; for no man who
looks at the great tongue of that glacier day Bossung--"

"Des Bossons," said the Professor, with a bland smile.

"Day Bossong," repeated the Captain, "can deny that it is marked with
all the lines, and waves, an eddies of a rollin' river, an' yet as
little can they deny that it seems as hard-and-fast as the rock of
Gibraltar."

The Professor nodded approvingly.

"You are right, Captain Whipper--"

"Wopper," said the Captain, with a grave nod.

"Wopper," repeated the Professor, "the glacier des Bossons, like all the
other glaciers, seems to remain immovable, though in reality it flows--
ever flows--downward; but its motion is so slow, that it is not
perceptible to the naked eye. Similarly, the hour-hand of a watch is to
appearance motionless. Do you want proof? Mark it just now; look again
in quarter of an hour, and you see that it has moved. You are
convinced. It is so with the glacier. Mark him to-day, go back
to-morrow--the mark has changed. Some glaciers flow at the rate of two
and three feet in the twenty-four hours."

"Yes, but _how_ do they flow, being so brittle?" demanded Mrs Stoutley.

"Ay, that's the pint, Professor," said the Captain, nodding, "_how_ do
they flow, bein' made of hard and brittle ice?"

"Why, by rolling higgledy-piggledy over itself of course," said Lewis,
flippantly, as he came up and sat down on the end of the sofa, being out
of humour with himself and everybody in consequence of having utterly
failed to gain the attention of Nita Horetzki, although he had made
unusually earnest efforts to join in conversation with her father.
Owing to somewhat similar feelings, the artist had flung himself into a
chair, and sat glaring at the black fireplace with a degree of
concentration that ought to have lighted the firewood therein.

"The cause of a glacier flowing," said the Professor, "has long been a
disputed point. Some men of science have held that it is the pressure
of ice and snow behind it which causes it to flow. They do not think
that it flows like water, but say it is forced from behind, and crushed
through gorges and down valleys, as it were, unwillingly. They say
that, if left alone, as they now are, without additions, from this time
forward, glaciers would no longer move; they would rest, and slowly melt
away; that their motion is due to