tinge of melancholy to the reflection of the thoughtful. In certain
regions these boulders are so numerous and so various in size as to be
used in building foundations, and sometimes entire habitations. These
rocks were dropped in remote centuries by passing icebergs, and are
solitary memorials of the ice-drift across our continent. The crafts
on which they voyaged were wrecked long ago. They were passengers on

"Some shattered berg, that, pale and lone,
Drifts from the white north to the tropic zone,
And in the burning day
Melts peak by peak away,
Till on some rosy even
It dies, with sunlight blessing it."

This instance may be taken as a parable, suggesting the history
embodied in names of localities, lakes, straits, rivers, cities,
hamlets, States. Those names are the debris of a dead era; and for
one, I can not escape the wonder and the pathos of these shattered
yesterdays, which have a voice, calling, as in hoarse whispers sad with
tears, "We are not, but we were."

Though we are little given to so esteeming the study, there is romance
in geography, learned by us when lads and lasses--not because we would,
but because we must--and such study was difficult and unsavory. The
catalogue of names we learned, perforce, was dreary as the alphabet;
and not a memory of pleasure lingers about the book in which we
studied, save that, in cramped, sprawling hand, upon the margin is
written the name of some little sweetheart beside our own,--and dead
long since. No, geography was not romantic. That was a possession we
never suspected. But romance is ubiquitous, like flowers of spring,
sheltering where we little anticipate.

To a lover of history, however, few studies will prove so fascinating
as a study of names in geography. Finding a few at random, feel the
thrill of the history they embody--history and reminiscence:
Providence, Roger Williams named the city so when himself was a
refugee; Fort Wayne, named for General "Mad Anthony" Wayne, who
destroyed the Indian scourge in the Northwest Territory in 1792;
Raleigh, so yclept for that chiefest friend of American colonization
among Englishmen, Sir Walter Raleigh; Council Grove, because, in the
Indian days, there, in a grove--rare in the prairie country of
Kansas--the Red Men met for counsel; Astoria, bearing name of that
famous fortune-maker in the fur country of the West and North; Buffalo
Lake, reminding us that there the buffalo tramp