each other's backs, and
felt the bridge tremble with their shocks, and listened to their horrible
grind and roar, till one got some little picture in one's mind of what
must be the breaking up of an ice-floe in the Arctic regions, and what
must be the danger of a ship nipped in the ice and lifted up on high,
like those in the pictures of Arctic voyages which you are so fond of
looking through. You cannot recollect how that winter even in our little
Blackwater Brook the alder stems were all peeled white, and scarred, as
if they had been gnawed by hares and deer, simply by the rushing and
scraping of the ice,--a sight which gave me again a little picture of the
destruction which the ice makes of quays, and stages, and houses along
the shore upon the coasts of North America, when suddenly setting in with
wind and tide, it jams and piles up high inland, as you may read for
yourself some day in a delightful book called _Frost and Fire_. You
recollect none of these things. Ice and snow are to you mere playthings;
and you long for winter, that you may make snowballs and play hockey and
skate upon the ponds, and eat ice like a foolish boy till you make your
stomach ache. And I dare say you have said, like many another boy, on a
bright cheery ringing frosty day, "Oh, that it would be always winter!"
You little knew for what you asked. You little thought what the earth
would soon be like, if it were always winter,--if one sheet of ice on the
pond glued itself on to the bottom of the last sheet, till the whole pond
was a solid mass,--if one snow-fall lay upon the top of another snow-fall
till the moor was covered many feet deep and the snow began sliding
slowly down the glen from Coombs's, burying the green fields, tearing the
trees up by their roots, burying gradually house, church, and village,
and making this place for a few thousand years what it was many thousand
years ago. Good-bye then, after a very few winters, to bees, and
butterflies, and singing-birds, and flowers; and good-bye to all
vegetables, and fruit, and bread; good-bye to cotton and woollen clothes.
You would have, if you were left alive, to dress in skins, and eat fish
and seals, if any came near enough to be caught. You would have to live
in a word, if you could live at all, as Esquimaux live now in Arctic
regions, and as people had to live in England ages since, in the times
when it was always winter, and icebergs floated between here and
Finchampstead.