In the winter of '46-7there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning,with many carloads of ungainly-looking farming tools,-sleds,plows,drill-barrows,turf-knives,spades,saws,rakes,and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff,such as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the Cultivator.I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye,or some other kind of grain recently introduced from Iceland.As I saw no manure,I judged that they meant to skim the land,as I had done,thinking the soil was deep and had lain fallow long enough.They said that a gentleman farmer,who was behind the scenes,wanted to double his money,which,as I understood,amounted to half a million already;but in order to cover each one of his dollars with another,he took off the only coat,ay,the skin itself,of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter.They went to work at once,plowing,harrowing,rolling,furrowing,in admirable order,as if they were bent on making this a model farm;but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow,a gang of fellows by my side suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself,with a peculiar jerk,clean down to the sand,or rather the water,-for it was a very springy soil,-indeed all the terra firma there was,-and haul it away on sleds,and then I guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog.So they came and went every day,with a peculiar shriek from the locomotive,from and to some point of the polar regions,as it seemed to me,like a flock of arctic snowbirds.But sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge,and a hired man,walking behind his team,slipped through a crack in the ground down toward Tartarus,and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man,almost gave up his animal heat,and was glad to take refuge in my house,and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove;or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a plowshare,or a plow got set in the furrow and had to be cut out.
To speak literally,a hundred Irishmen,with Yankee overseers,came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice.They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require deion,and these,being sledded to the shore,were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform,and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle,worked by horses,on to a stack,as surely as so many barrels of flour,and there placed evenly side by side,and row upon row,as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds.They told me that in a good day they could get out a thousand tons,which was the yield of about one acre.Deep ruts and “cradleholes”were worn in the ice,as on terra firma,by the passage of the sleds over the same track,and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed out like buckets.They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side and six or seven rods square,putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air;for when the wind,though never so cold,finds a passage through,it will wear large cavities,leaving slight supports or studs only here and there,and finally topple it down.At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla;but when they began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices,and this became covered with rime and icicles,it looked like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin,built of azure-tinted marble,the abode of Winter,that old man we see in the almanac,-his shanty,as if he had a design to estivate with us.They calculated that not twenty-five per cent.of this would reach its destination,and that two or three per cent.would be wasted in the cars.However,a still greater part of this heap had a different destiny from what was intended;for,either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected,containing more air than usual,or for some other reason,it never got to market.This heap,made in the winter of '46-7and estimated to contain ten thousand tons,was finally covered with hay and boards;and though it was unroofed the following July,and a part of it carried off,the rest remaining exposed to the sun,it stood over that summer and the next winter,and was not quite melted till September,1848.Thus the pond recovered the greater part.
Like the water,the Walden ice,seen near at hand,has a green tint,but at a distance is beautifully blue,and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river,or the merely greenish ice of some ponds,a quarter of a mile off.Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street,and lies there for a week like a great emerald,an object of interest to all passers.I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will often,when frozen,appear from the same point of view blue.So the hollows about this pond will,sometimes,in the winter,be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own,but the next day will have frozen blue.Perhaps the blue color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain,and the most transparent is the bluest.Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation.They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever.Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid,but frozen remains sweet forever?It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.
Thus for sixteen days I saw from my window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen,with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming,such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac;and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of the lark and the reapers,or the parable of the sower,and the like;and now they are all gone,and in thirty days more,probably,I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there,reflecting the clouds and the trees,and sending up its evaporations in solitude,and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there.Perhaps I shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself,or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat,like a floating leaf,beholding his form reflected in the waves,where lately a hundred men securely labored.
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans,of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta,drink at my well.In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat-Geeta,since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed,and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial;and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence,so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions.I lay down the book and go to my well for water,and lo!there I meet the servant of the Bramin,priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra,who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas,or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug.I meet his servant come to draw water for his master,and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well.The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges.With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides,makes the periplus of Hanno,and floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf,melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas,and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.