Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for ChildrenKingsley, Charles
History
Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children
Kingsley, Charles
Geology -- Juvenile literature; Natural history -- Juvenile literature
vegetables, and fruit, and bread; good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes.
You would have, if you were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish
and seals, if any came near enough to be caught. You would have to live
in a word, if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic
regions, and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times
when it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and
Finchampstead. Oh no, my child: thank Heaven that it is not always
winter; and remember that winter ice and snow, though it is a very good
tool with which to make the land, must leave the land year by year if
that land is to be fit to live in.
I said that if the snow piled high enough upon the moor, it would come
down the glen in a few years through Coombs's Wood; and I said then you
would have a small glacier here--such a glacier (to compare small things
with great) as now comes down so many valleys in the Alps, or has come
down all the valleys of Greenland and Spitzbergen till they reach the
sea, and there end as cliffs of ice, from which great icebergs snap off
continually, and fall and float away, wandering southward into the
Atlantic for many a hundred miles. You have seen drawings of such
glaciers in Captain Cook's Voyages; and you may see photographs of Swiss
glaciers in any good London print-shop; and therefore you have seen
almost as much about them as I have seen, and may judge for yourself how
you would like to live where it is always winter.
Now you must not ask me to tell you what a glacier is like, for I have
never seen one; at least, those which I have seen were more than fifty
miles away, looking like white clouds hanging on the gray mountain sides.
And it would be an impertinence--that means a meddling with things which
I have no business--to picture to you glaciers which have been pictured
so well and often by gentlemen who escape every year from their hard work
in town to find among the glaciers of the Alps health and refreshment,
and sound knowledge, and that most wholesome and strengthening of all
medicines, toil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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