sed to see so great
a body of ice remaining. Not seeing any ducks, he hid his boat on the
north or back side of an island in the pond, and then concealed himself
in the bushes on the south side, to await them. The ice was melted for
three or four rods from the shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet
of water, with a muddy bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he
thought it likely that some would be along pretty soon. After he had
lain still there about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant
sound, but singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever
heard, gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal
and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him all
at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to settle there,
and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and excited; but he found,
to his surprise, that the whole body of the ice had started while he lay
there, and drifted in to the shore, and the sound he had heard was made
by its edge grating on the shore--at first gently nibbled and crumbled
off, but at length heaving up and scattering its wrecks along the island
to a considerable height before it came to a standstill.

At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm winds
blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun, dispersing
the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and white smoking
with incense, through which the traveller picks his way from islet to
islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets
whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing
off.

Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which
thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut
on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village, a
phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though the number of
freshly exposed banks of the right material must have been greatly
multiplied since railroads were invented. The material was sand of every
degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly mixed with
a little clay. When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a
thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes like
lava, sometimes bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where
no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little streams overlap and
interlace one with another, exhibiting a sort of