e 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.

Spring

The opening of large tracts by the ice-cutters commonly causes a pond
to break up earlier; for the water, agitated by the wind, even in cold
weather, wears away the surrounding ice. But such was not the effect on
Walden that year, for she had soon got a thick new garment to take the
place of the old. This pond never breaks up so soon as the others in
this neighborhood, on account both of its greater depth and its having
no stream passing through it to melt or wear away the ice. I never knew
it to open in the course of a winter, not excepting that of '52-3, which
gave the ponds so severe a trial. It commonly opens about the first
of April, a week or ten days later than Flint's Pond and Fair Haven,
beginning to melt on the north side and in the shallower parts where
it began to freeze. It indicates better than any water hereabouts the
absolute progress of the season, being least affected by transient
changes of temperature. A severe cold of a few days duration in
March may very much retard the opening of the former ponds, while the
temperature of Walden increases almost uninterruptedly. A thermometer
t