It's seldom you can get a snap-shot at an avalanche--it's so sudden! Then, when you do get one you must be an expert or your picture will be a blur. This picture was taken by Merl La Voy. An interesting thing about it is that the scene is on Mount McKinley, which, as your geography will tell you, is the highest mountain in North America. The avalanche started near the top, where the greatest fields of loose snow lie. We see it in the act of plunging into a vast crevasse several miles below, and sending up clouds of snow. They look like steam. ] MR. GLACIER'S CATERPILLAR TRACTOR "The glaciers," says Reclus, "seem as motionless as the peaks that tower above them." Nevertheless, as we know, they do move. While the motion is in so many respects like that of a river that glaciers are often called "ice rivers," they have motions and, so to say, "methods" that curiously suggest the inventions of men. Take, for example, the way they climb down a steep hill; for all the world like the "tanks" in the Great War. The tanks, you remember, made nothing of shell holes, rough country, ravines, or trenches, but lumbered and crushed their way along, resistless as the Fates. And, you may also recall, the tanks moved by laying sections of themselves--the great cleats on the outside belt--which they picked up again, as they advanced. This was called the "caterpillar tractor" system of travelling. Now watch the glacier when it comes to an incline much steeper than its ordinary slope. It breaks across in sections at right angles to its bed, and section after section drops down. Then the forward sections crowded upon by those in the rear are pushed up close, freeze together again, and on goes the glacier as good as new. As a traveller, however, it is a little slow. It made faster time in the old days--in the Ice Age--when glaciers were so much larger, but to-day, at the rate at which ordinary glaciers travel, it may take a boulder as big as Plymouth Rock something like a hundred years to be carried from the upper fields to the heap of stones and soil which your geography calls a "terminal moraine," and where Mr. Glacier says: "All out! Far as we go." HIDE AND SEEK IN THE LIBRARY How would you like to go to school to the pretty Misses Soldanella? They can teach you a lot about botany. If you learn what an unusual thing they do with their leaves, for instance, that will lead you to follow up leaves in general. Leaves are wonderful things. Indeed, it isn't often you find the leaf of a book that will tell you half as much as the leaf of a plant, if you only know how to read it.