Page:Columbia - America's Great Highway.djvu/18

 In their imperceptible movements these mighty glaciers wore through the lava beds in many places, cutting gashes hundreds of feet in depth, grinding to powder the older limestone and other rocks beneath them. These fragments were mingled by the hand of God with ash and other particles of the igneous mass, which He took from the very bowels of the earth. The little rivulets joined with mountain torrents to bring the product of the glaciers down into the valleys, where He spread it out, producing a soil rich in everything that ministers to man.

Then the Prince of All Gardens planted the seeds of a thousand springtimes. Some flowers He made to grow high up in the clefts of the rocks, in fields of snow. The anemone and heather He planted a little lower down, just where the trees begin; and when He came to where the earth slopes gently out in upland meadows, jeweled with sparkling waterbrooks, He gave more freely of His abundance and carpeted the earth with flowers of every tint and hue. Alpine firs He planted here and there, grouping them, and adding others as He came down into the valleys, where He made the flowering shrubs and ferns to grow in the midst of dark, cool forests of great and stately trees, the shelter of His creatures.

There is a beauty in the bare angles of the rocks with look down from the heights, where His fingers broke them. Here He rent and tore them asunder, to make room for one of earth's great rivers.