up on that fine morning described in the ninth verse of the first chapter of Genesis may still be traced by the amateur fisherman who has gone up to the narrow trout brook at the head of the Connecticut. It is the same rock which you pass on the Vanderbilt road, just north of the Mohawk, at Little Falls and along in such places, if you are on Howells's "Wedding Journey" or on Lucy Poor's.

Lord Ashburton and Mr. Webster agreed for the northeastern part of the country to make an artificial line. But you and I, for the convenience of things, may recollect that all of us New Englanders probably live above the oldest land in the world. That is the reason of a certain arrogance which other people accuse us of. But, really, we have not much to do with that steaming rock of a hundred million æons ago, for all New England was made over again, it seems, when the glaciers came down from the north, covering us all over with a sheet of ice which was a thousand feet thick, or more, even over the top of our Mount Washington. It drifted

south and south and south, until the Atlantic Ocean proved to be too warm for it. It left its gravel and sand and smaller boulders first in a ridge which became Long Island, Block Island, and Nantucket, and, after years more, it made another ridge which is now southern Connecticut and southern Rhode Island and Cape Cod, I suppose, including, among other excellent places, my own summer home. And, still again, it made a third ridge, five or ten miles inland from the Long Island Sound of to-day. Recollect this, my sophomore friend, when walking through New England with your nightgown and toothbrush in a knapsack. Recollect this, Madam Champernoon, as your chauffeur takes you along the Connecticut Valley at a rate not exceeding fifteen miles an hour, as required by the statute, in those last happy moments before the boiler explodes and you and he leave the study of terrestrial geology.

Of this territory, of which we have established the age in such satisfactory and substantial fashion, the state of Maine makes nearly one

half

-thirty-three thousand square miles. The people of Maine call it the "State of Maine," with a certain pride and frequency not observable in other states. You say Delaware did this or

Ohio did that, when a Maine man is a little apt to say, "the State of Maine" did this and the "State of Maine" did that. This is because from near the beginning until 1820 it was the District, or vernacular "Deestrict," of Maine.