sary. I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear the
chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for
his stores must be now nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture
out of his winter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the
bluebird, song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot
thick. As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the
water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was
completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the middle
was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you could put
your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the next day evening,
perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would have wholly
disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spirited away. One year I went
across the middle only five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845
Walden was first completely open on the 1st of April; in '46, the 25th
of March; in '47, the 8th of April; in '51, the 28th of March; in '52,
the 18th of April; in '53, the 23d of March; in '54, about the 7th of
April.

Every incident connected with the breaking up of the rivers and ponds
and the settling of the weather is particularly interesting to us who
live in a climate of so great extremes. When the warmer days come, they
who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night with a startling
whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy fetters were rent from end to
end, and within a few days see it rapidly going out. So the alligator
comes out of the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who has
been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thoroughly wise in regard
to all her operations as if she had been put upon the stocks when he was
a boy, and he had helped to lay her keel--who has come to his growth,
and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if he should live to the age
of Methuselah--told me--and I was surprised to hear him express wonder
at any of Nature's operations, for I thought that there were no secrets
between them--that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and thought
that he would have a little sport with the ducks. There was ice still on
the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and he dropped down
without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to Fair Haven Pond,
which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most part with a firm
field of ice. It was a warm day, and he was surpri