In the Britannica and other books that you may not yet be old enough to read you will find many more curious things about lakes. I can't tell which one of my readers you are, you see, but if you belong to the "younger set," father, mother, or some other member of the family can do the looking up and then tell you about it.[44] In the Britannica will be found such interesting things as this: [Footnote 44: I don't know of anything that is more fun, of an evening, than looking up things in an encyclopædia--except looking them up in _two_ encyclopædias.] How certain kinds of mountains and lakes are made at one and the same time--by the same movement. How even the wind may make lakes. Why lakes are to the land what lands are to the sea. Then if you will turn to page 75 of that fascinating little book we have already dipped into several times[45] you will find what the fact that lakes are to the land what islands are to the sea has to do with a peculiar beetle in the Shetland Islands (where the ponies come from) and the famous tailless cat of the Isle of Man. [Footnote 45: "Colin Clout's Calendar."] One of the quaintest little bits of real life in Lakeland is how the baby gulls of the Great Lakes worry their papas and mamas by going swimming before they are old enough; how their parents give them a spanking and send them back home; and how kind all the lady gulls are to the little gulls of neighbors that come to their houses to play with their children.[46] [Footnote 46: "The Bird, Our Brother," by Olive Thorne Miller.] [Illustration: DROWNED VALLEYS ON THE MAINE COAST Wherever you see very irregular shores, as along the coast of Maine, you may infer that the shores have sunk so that the waters of the sea came up into the river valleys, and the hills and long tongues of high land became islands and peninsulas. ] CHAPTER X (OCTOBER) To-night the winds begin to rise And roar from yonder dropping day; The last red leaf is whirled away, The rooks are blown about the skies. --_Tennyson._ THE AUTUMN WINDS AND THE ROCK MILLS OF THE SEA Nothing looks more aimless, more unorganized, perhaps, than the long turmoil of the waves of the sea which begins in late autumn and continues through the winter months. If, with your nose well over the edge of a cliff, you look straight down, you will see something like this: With every forward leap of the surges the waters are divided and entangled among the rocks, and division after division is beaten back by the upright wall in front and the broken blocks of stone on this side and on that. On-coming waves, met by those recoiling, rise into mountainous, struggling masses of wild fury. The whole affair seems to be as clear a case of wasted energy as a Mexican revolution.