formed in winter, but it takes the summer sun to set them adrift and
send them floating on the ocean, a grand sight to look at but a fearful
menace to vessels.

Icebergs are born every day in every month, but most of them remain in
or near their native waters for a long time before they escape and
wander to the great lanes of travel between here and Europe.

The bergs seen last summer are from two to ten years old--that is, they
have had an existence individually for years, though the ice from which
they are formed is much older, some of it possibly having been frozen
first a thousand years ago.

Icebergs are born of glaciers, and four out of five of the floating
bergs on the Atlantic come from Greenland. A glacier is a river of solid
water confined in the depressions running down the mountain sides.

Soft and powdery snow falls upon the summits, and though some is
evaporated, the yearly fall is greater than the yearly loss, and so the
excess is pushed down the slope into the valleys which possibly at the
time are covered with green and have afforded pasture lands for cattle.

The snow gathers in the high valleys and every day undergoes some degree
of the change which finally transforms it into ice. Slowly, very slowly,
in some cases only a foot every year, this frozen river flows downward.
Nothing can stop it, nothing can even check it.

The process is the same in Switzerland and Greenland, only in
Switzerland the glacier melts when it reaches the lower valley and feeds
rivers; in Greenland the glacier slides into the ocean, breaks off and