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.