ence in the stability of the frame of things, and in their
orderly continuance. Another winter will come, it proclaims, when the
ponds will be pretty sure to freeze. If they don't freeze, and never
do again--well, who has an ice-house big enough in that event?

My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions; not architecturally, of
course, for there has been no great development yet in ice-house lines,
and this one was home-done; it is a satisfaction morally, being one
thing I have done that is neither more nor less. I have the big-barn
weakness--the desire for ice--for ice to melt--as if I were no wiser
than the ice-man! I builded bigger than I knew when I put the stone
porches about the dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the architect
first instead of the town assessors. I took no counsel of pride in
building the ice-house, nor of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said: "I
will build me a house to carry a year's supply of ice and no more,
however the price of ice may rise, and even with the risk of facing
seven hot and iceless years. I have laid up enough things among the
moths and rust. Ice against the rainy day I will provide, but ice for
my children and my children's children, ice for a possible cosmic
reversal that might twist the equator over the poles, I will not
provide for. Nor will I go into the ice business."

Nor did I! And I say the building of that ice-house has been an
immense satisfaction to me. I entertain my due share of

"Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire";

but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned above would as likely as
not bring on another Ice Age, or indeed--

". . . run back and fetch the Age of Gold."

To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold storage--that seems to
me the thing.

I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; or
is it not rather that I crowd a year into a day? Such days are
possible. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. Ice-day is
a chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day of
First Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay is
made when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but ice
of the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right for
harvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult as
to make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June. June! why, June knows
no such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of