The land above the old lake shore is bare scratched rock or rocky soil called boulder till. Every hill farm has been cleared of more stones than trees, and it is only with the vogue of the rock garden that these erratics have found any merit in man’s estimation. It has been said with a considerable element of truth that the lake margin can be identified by the stone fences heaped up by exasperated farmers at the line where the water once lapped the slopes of the glaciated hills. Striations and erratics decorate the tops of Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke, and those who visit Mount Monadnock or Mount Washington will find they must inscribe their initials over the signature of the great ice sheet. The stranger rocks or erratics, stranded promiscuously over the countryside, can be traced to hills farther north. Clearly the ice sheet was moving southward, picking up debris and abrading the countryside like a great sanding machine. Northern slopes were worn to long gentle inclines and the southern slopes kept their original forms or were steepened as the ice plucked fractured blocks from their moorings. One imaginative writer likened the glaciated rock hills to the wigs of sheep’s wool worn by the jurists of his day; the name stuck, and they are still known as _roches moutonnées_. Look at the Pelham Hills from the Coolidge Memorial Bridge and you will see the top of Jeffrey Lord Amherst’s wig facing towards Canada. Within the Connecticut Lowland the moving ice often picked up a load of debris more cumbersome than it could drag along. It handled the situation most satisfactorily by dropping the load and streamlining it, and these piles of glacial debris with blunt north slopes and gentle southerly sides are drumlins. When next you pass the apple orchards of South Amherst, recall that the smooth elliptical hill east of the road to South Hadley is a drumlin, a relic of an overloaded glacier. _Just Before the Ice Age_ The glacier advanced as far as Long Island and Martha’s Vineyard, and the lakes of the Connecticut Valley formed along the ice margin and spread northward as the ice front receded. The distinct layers, or varves, of clay mark off 25,000 years since the recession began, but for a million years before its final retreat, the ice covered all New England intermittently. This length of time transcends human comprehension unless one considers years in terms of what has been done. A million years is not too long for a sand-laden ice sheet, moving only a few feet each year, to grind tens of feet of solid rock off the north sides of the “everlasting” hills. To those who study the earth, “Before the Ice Age” has about the same significance as “Before the Hurricane” has to the average citizen of New England. It is in such terms that geologic time must be considered.