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 snow-birds. 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 description, 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 "cradle-holes" 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 foun