f
"black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, the
harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled with
crops made in the summer's curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and
run together! So do they complement and multiply each other! Like the
star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three
rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of
twelve shining circles running round the year--the tinkling ice of
February in the goblet of October!--the apples of October red and ripe
on what might have been April's empty platter!

He who sows the seasons and gathers the months into ice-house and barn
lives not from sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of the clock,
but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit clear around the sun--the
smell of mint in the hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the
prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle warning of night
coming on. Twelve times one are twelve--by so many times are months
and meanings and values multiplied for him whose fourteen acres bring
forth abundantly--provided that the barns on the place be kept safely
small.

Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, and without place on a wise
man's estate. As birds have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have
a place to lay his head, with a _mansion_ prepared in the sky for his
soul.

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns of
an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say
to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat,
drink, and be merry among the cakes"--and when the autumn comes he
still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out!
No soul can be merry long on ice--nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks,
nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities. He who builds
great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice must
never become a man's only crop; for then winter means nothing but ice;
and the year nothing but winter; for the year's never at the spring for
him, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercury
is down to zero.

As I have already intimated, a safe kind of ice-house is one like mine,
that cannot hold more than eighteen tons--a year's supply (shrinkage
and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for). Such an ice-house
is not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal of
confid