Madam How and Lady Why | Page 9

eyes. And I do not blame you. I looked at this
very glen for fifteen years before I made that guess; and I have looked
at it some ten years since, to make sure that my guess held good. For
man after all is very blind, my dear boy, and very stupid, and cannot
see what lies under his own feet all day long; and if Lady Why, and He
whom Lady Why obeys, were not very patient and gentle with mankind,
they would have perished off the face of the earth long ago, simply
from their own stupidity. I, at least, was very stupid in this case, for I
had my head full of earthquakes, and convulsions of nature, and all
sorts of prodigies which never happened to this glen; and so, while I
was trying to find what was not there, I of course found nothing. But

when I put them all out of my head, and began to look for what was
there, I found it at once; and lo and behold! I had seen it a thousand
times before, and yet never learnt anything from it, like a stupid man as
I was; though what I learnt you may learn as easily as I did.
And what did I find?
The pond at the bottom of the glen.
You know that pond, of course? You don't need to go there? Very well.
Then if you do, do not you know also that the pond is always filling up
with sand and mud; and that though we clean it out every three or four
years, it always fills again? Now where does that sand and mud come
from?
Down that stream, of course, which runs out of this bog. You see it
coming down every time there is a flood, and the stream fouls.
Very well. Then, said Madam How to me, as soon as I recollected that,
"Don't you see, you stupid man, that the stream has made the glen, and
the earth which runs down the stream was all once part of the hill on
which you stand." I confess I was very much ashamed of myself when
she said that. For that is the history of the whole mystery. Madam How
is digging away with her soft spade, water. She has a harder spade, or
rather plough, the strongest and most terrible of all ploughs; but that, I
am glad to say, she has laid by in England here.
Water? But water is too simple a thing to have dug out all this great
glen.
My dear child, the most wonderful part of Madam How's work is, that
she does such great things and so many different things, with one and
the same tool, which looks to you so simple, though it really is not so.
Water, for instance, is not a simple thing, but most complicated; and we
might spend hours in talking about water, without having come to the
end of its wonders. Still Madam How is a great economist, and never
wastes her materials. She is like the sailor who boasted (only she never
boasts) that, if he had but a long life and a strong knife, he would build
St. Paul's Cathedral before he was done. And Madam How has a very
long life, and plenty of time; and one of the strongest of all her tools is
water. Now if you will stoop down and look into the heather, I will
show you how she is digging out the glen with this very mist which is
hanging about our feet. At least, so I guess.
For see how the mist clings to the points of the heather leaves, and

makes drops. If the hot sun came out the drops would dry, and they
would vanish into the air in light warm steam. But now that it is dark
and cold they drip, or run down the heather-stems, to the ground. And
whither do they go then? Whither will the water go,--hundreds of
gallons of it perhaps,--which has dripped and run through the heather in
this single day? It will sink into the ground, you know. And then what
will become of it? Madam How will use it as an underground spade,
just as she uses the rain (at least, when it rains too hard, and therefore
the rain runs off the moor instead of sinking into it) as a spade above
ground.
Now come to the edge of the glen, and I will show you the mist that fell
yesterday, perhaps, coming out of the ground again, and hard at work.
You know of what an odd, and indeed of what a pretty form all these
glens are. How the flat moor ends suddenly in a steep rounded bank,
almost like