How did the mammoth get his name? Was it because he was so big--such a "mammoth" creature?[9] [Footnote 9: Mammoth, you will find, comes from a word meaning "earth." It didn't mean "big" at all at first. One of the most lovable traits of a good dictionary, I think, is that it tells so many interesting little stories like that about the early life of words; of their days of adventure, so to speak, when there was no telling _how_ they would come out.] How did the mammoths compare in size with the elephants of to-day? Which was the bigger, the mastodon or the mammoth? Did we ever have mastodons in North America? And were there mammoths, too? If you want to see more about what the travelling menageries of the days before the Ice Age looked like hunt up these words: _Archelon_, _dinosaur_, _ceratosaurus_, _diplodocus_, _stegosaurus_, _triceratops_. See what the geography says about the manufacturing towns of New England and how many of them have water power. In that remarkable little book by Grant Allen[10] already referred to in the H. & S. at the end of Chapter I, on page 139, you will find what the Ice Age had to do with the fact that the rabbits of Canada and our northern border States wear white clothes in winter, while Br'er Rabbit of our Middle and Southern States keeps his yellow-brown suit on all the year. [Footnote 10: "Colin Clout's Calendar."] And on page 204 how a little plant, whose old home was in the Arctics, got stranded on an English hilltop among the mossy clefts of weathered granite, and how the beautiful lady who has a little flower named after her slipper (we all know that slipper) is leaving England because the climate is too mild! [Illustration: THE SUMMER PASTURES ON THE JUNGFRAU Here are some of those Swiss cattle in their summer pastures. Doesn't look much like summer, does it? But there's one thing besides the cattle that tells. See that stretch of snow all by itself? That's a snow-bank which has escaped the summer sun because it is protected by the ravine in which it lies. All around it the ground is bare of snow. ] CHAPTER III (MARCH) With rushing winds and gloomy skies The dark and stubborn Winter dies; Far off, unseen, Spring faintly cries, Bidding her earliest child arise. --_Bayard Taylor._ THE SOUL OF THE SPRING AND THE LANDS OF ETERNAL SNOW And that's how the Old Men of the Mountain visited us in the Ice Age and what they did and how they did it. But now that they have all been back home so long don't you think it would be nice and polite to return the call--especially when you remember all they did for us, making beautiful lakes and rivers and waterfalls and mountain scenery? I. Springtime in the Alps