the head of the other, one on the ice, the other
on the trees or hillside.

While yet it is cold January, and snow and ice are thick and solid, the
prudent landlord comes from the village to get ice to cool his summer
drink; impressively, even pathetically, wise, to foresee the heat and
thirst of July now in January--wearing a thick coat and mittens! when so
many things are not provided for. It may be that he lays up no treasures
in this world which will cool his summer drink in the next. He cuts and
saws the solid pond, unroofs the house of fishes, and carts off their
very element and air, held fast by chains and stakes like corded wood,
through the favoring winter air, to wintry cellars, to underlie the
summer there. It looks like solidified azure, as, far off, it is drawn
through the streets. These ice-cutters are a merry race, full of jest
and sport, and when I went among them they were wont to invite me to saw
pit-fashion with them, I standing underneath.

In the winter of '46-7 there 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,
barrowing, 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,