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giving advice to workmen. Venturing one day to substitute deeds for words, he turned up
his cuffs, seized a plasterer's board, and having loaded his trowel without mishap, with a
complacent look toward the lathing overhead, made a bold gesture thitherward; and
straightway, to his complete discomfiture, received the whole contents in his ruffled
bosom. I admired anew the economy and convenience of plastering, which so effectually
shuts out the cold and takes a handsome finish, and I learned the various casualties to
which the plasterer is liable. I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which
drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls
of water it takes to christen a new hearth. I had the previous winter made a small quantity
of lime by burning the shells of the Unio fluviatilis, which our river affords, for the sake
of the experiment; so that I knew where my materials came from. I might have got good
limestone within a mile or two and burned it myself, if I had cared to do so.
The pond had in the meanwhile skimmed over in the shadiest and shallowest coves, some
days or even weeks before the general freezing. The first ice is especially interesting and
perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever
offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can lie at your length on ice
only an inch thick, like a skater insect on the surface of the water, and study the bottom at
your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like a picture behind a glass, and the water
Walden& 180
is necessarily always smooth then. There are many furrows in the sand where some
creature has travelled about and doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with
the cases of caddis-worms made of minute grains of white quartz. Perhaps these have
creased it, for you find some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep and broad
for them to make. But the ice itself is the object of most interest, though you must
improve the earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it closely the morning after it
freezes, you find that the greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to be within
it, are against its under surface, and that more are continually rising from the bottom;
while the ice is as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the water through it.
These bubbles are from an eightieth to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and
beautiful, and you see your face reflected in them through the ice. There may be thirty or
forty of them to a square inch. There are also already within the ice narrow oblong
perpendicular bubbles about half an inch long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or
oftener, if the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one directly above another, like
a string of beads. But these within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those
beneath. I sometimes used to cast on stones to try the strength of the ice, and those which
broke through carried in air with them, which formed very large and conspicuous white
bubbles beneath. One day when I came to the same place forty-eight hours afterward, I
found that those large bubbles were still perfect, though an inch more of ice had formed,
as I could see distinctly by the seam in the edge of a cake. But as the last two days had
been very warm, like an Indian summer, the ice was not now transparent, showing the
dark green color of the water, and the bottom, but opaque and whitish or gray, and though
twice as thick was hardly stronger than before, for the air bubbles had greatly expanded
under this heat and run together, and lost their regularity; they were no longer one
directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping
another, or in thin flakes, as if occupying slight cleavages. The beauty of the ice was
gone, and it was too late to study the bottom. Being curious to know what position my
great bubbles occupied with regard to the new ice, I broke out a cake containing a
middling sized one, and turned it bottom upward. The new ice had formed around and
under the bubble, so that it was included between the two ices. It was wholly in the lower
ice, but close against the upper, and was flattish, or perhaps slightly lenticular, with a
Walden& 181
rounded edge, a quarter of an inch deep by four inches in diameter; and I was surprised to
find that directly under the bubble the ice was melted with great regularity in the form of
a saucer reversed, to the height of five eighths of an inch in the middle, leaving a thin
partition there between the water and the bubble, hardly an eighth of an inch thick; and in
many places the small bubbles in this partition had burst out downward, and probably
there was no ice at all under the largest bubbles, which were a foot in diameter. I inferred
that the infinite number of minute bubbles which I had first seen against the under surface
of the ice were now frozen in likewise, and that each, in its degree, had operated like a
burning-glass on the ice beneath to melt and rot it. These are the little air-guns which
contribute to make the ice crack and whoop.
At length the winter set in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind
began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Night
after night the geese came lumbering in the dark with a clangor and a whistling of wings,
even after the ground was covered with snow, some to alight in Walden, and some flying
low over the woods toward Fair Haven, bound for Mexico. Several times, when returning
from the village at ten or eleven o'clock at night, I heard the tread of a flock of geese, or
else ducks, on the dry leaves in the woods by a pond-hole behind my dwelling, where
they had come up to feed, and the faint honk or quack of their leader as they hurried off.
In 1845 Walden froze entirely over for the first time on the night of the 22d of December,
Flint's and other shallower ponds and the river having been frozen ten days or more; in
'46, the 16th; in '49, about the 31st; and in '50, about the 27th of December; in '52, the 5th
of January; in '53, the 31st of December. The snow had already covered the ground since
the 25th of November, and surrounded me suddenly with the scenery of winter. I
withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my
house and within my breast. My employment out of doors now was to collect the dead
wood in the forest, bringing it in my hands or on my shoulders, or sometimes trailing a
dead pine tree under each arm to my shed. An old forest fence which had seen its best
days was a great haul for me. I sacrificed it to Vulcan, for it was past serving the god
Terminus. How much more interesting an event is that man's supper who has just been
forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with! His bread
Walden& 182
and meat are sweet. There are enough fagots and waste wood of all kinds in the forests of
most of our towns to support many fires, but which at present warm none, and, some
think, hinder the growth of the young wood. There was also the driftwood of the pond. In
the course of the summer I had discovered a raft of pitch pine logs with the bark on,
pinned together by the Irish when the railroad was built. This I hauled up partly on the
shore. After soaking two years and then lying high six months it was perfectly sound,
though waterlogged past drying. I amused myself one winter day with sliding this
piecemeal across the pond, nearly half a mile, skating behind with one end of a log fifteen
feet long on my shoulder, and the other on the ice; or I tied several logs together with a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]