I enjoyed the ridges in the pastures along the foothills of the grim-faced Tunnel Mountain, and about Aurora’s Lake, which reflects like a pretty little mirror the rugged beauty of the hills. This lake is partly natural, but now dammed artificially. Every line of its terraced shores bears the scars of antiquity, which would indicate that ten thousand years ago a larger lake slept in this hollow vale which geologists have estimated at a depth of six hundred feet. Here are rich deposits of glacial drift, and northeast of Aurora’s Lake are sphagnous swamps, where I find many rare orchids and early spring blossoms. Here both the pink and yellow Moccasin-Flowers bloom in May, while in June the queen of the tribe unfolds her white-petaled purity. [Illustration: =The Botanizing Can, or Vasculum, showing the White-Petaled Lady’s Slippers and Maiden-Hair Fern.=] This bogland is very similar to that of the Swamp of Oracles in Pownal, in District Fourteen, save for the openness of the former’s shores. Aurora’s Swamp is located in a deep flinty basin, surrounded only by low tangled bushes and open pasture-land beyond, without forests to shield the bogs from the sweep of winds. The hills are strewn with great boulders left here in the Glacial Age, which rest, poised as monuments of that mystical period. Especially interesting are the dimpled erosions upon one boulder, which rests just northeast of the lakelet, upon the ridges sloping eastward toward the sphagnous swamp. There are visible deep scratches, hollows, arches and miniature pillars, which the whirling eddies of the perilous waves have eroded during the ages unknown. Higher on the summit of the Hoosac rests another immense rock known to students of geology as the “Great Vermonter.” It is said to have been brought from the marble and granite heights of Vermont, imbedded in the ice-drift. Through the melting of the glacial sheet, one of the drifting bergs left this hero of the ages as we may see it now, moored and balanced high on old Hoosac’s brow. The geological surveys of northern Massachusetts, by President Hitchcock of Amherst in 1838, early identified all of the low, round hills to be seen southward from Aurora’s Lake as the result of glacial action. Mount Greylock’s Brotherhood is a group of giant glacial hills, as it were, and is the highest pile of Taconic formation in this State. The erosions of the great ice-sheet are plainly seen on the rocky summits of these mountains, and only time and the decay of the rock itself will do away with these scars of that mystical age. The name of “Greylock” appears to be derived from the lowering cloud-mist so often capping the whole Brotherhood at early dawn or before a storm. Vermonters who, from the hills at a great distance to the north, view this group of mountains, depend upon this capping of clouds as a forecast of the weather. Among the old folk, it is known and designated as “Greylock’s Nightcap,” a portent of a coming storm.