about a yard apart, each armed with a chisel-bar, and marching in
line, puncture the ice at each step, with a single sharp thrust. To
and fro they go, leaving a belt behind them that presently becomes
saturated with water. But ice, to be of first quality, must grow from
beneath, not from above. It is a crop quite as uncertain as any other.
A good yield every two or three years, as they say of wheat out west,
is about all that can be counted upon. When there is an abundant
harvest, after the ice houses are filled, they stack great quantities
of it, as the farmer stacks his surplus hay. Such a fruitful winter
was that of '74-5, when the ice formed twenty inches thick. The stacks
are given only a temporary covering of boards, and are the first ice
removed in the season. The cutting and gathering of the ice enlivens
these broad, white, desolate fields amazingly. My house happens to
stand where I look down upon the busy scene, as from a hill-top upon
a river meadow in haying time, only here figures stand out much
more sharply than they do from a summer meadow. There is the broad,
straight, blue-black canal emerging into view, and running nearly
across the river; this is the highway that lays open the farm. On
either side lie the fields, or ice meadows, each marked out by cedar
or hemlock boughs. The farther one is cut first, and when cleared,
shows a large, long, black parallelogram in the midst of the plain
of snow. Then the next one is cut, leaving a strip or tongue of ice
between the two for the horses to move and turn upon. Sometimes nearly
two hundred men and boys, with numerous horses, are at work at once,
marking, plowing, planing, scraping, sawing, hauling, chiseling; some
floating down the pond on great square islands towed by a horse, or
their fellow workmen; others distributed along the canal, bending to
their ice-hooks; others upon the bridges separating the blocks with
their chisel bars; others feeding the elevators; while knots and
straggling lines of idlers here and there look on in cold discontent,
unable to get a job. The best crop of ice is an early crop. Late in
the season or after January, the ice is apt to get 'sun-struck,' when
it becomes 'shaky,' like a piece of poor timber. The sun, when he
sets about destroying the ice, does not simply melt it from the
surface--that were a slow process; but he sends his shafts into it and
separates it into spikes and needles--in short, makes kindling-wood of
it, so