the ice.

This year it fell early in February--rather late in the season; so
late, in fact, that, in spite of my faith in winter, I began to grow
anxious--something no one on a hill in Hingham need ever do. Since New
Year's Day unseasonable weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain
skies, rain and snow and sleet--that soft, spongy weather when the ice
soaks and grows soggy. By the middle of January what little ice there
had been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house was still empty.

Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the wind
settled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen over
the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear the
close-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars.
Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of the
garden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillside
pines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle
silence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the taut
boreal night you could hear a hollow rumbling running down the length
of the pond--the ice being split with the wide iron wedge of the cold.

Down and down for three days slipped the silver column in the
thermometer until at eight o'clock on the fourth day it stood just
above zero. Cold? It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice on
the little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked across
it, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the
stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of the
wind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow. Another day
and night like this and the solid square-edged blocks could come in.

I looked at the glass late that night and found it still falling. I
went on out beneath the stars. It may have been the tightened
telephone wires overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ringing with
the distant tread of the coming north wind, yet over these, and with
them, I heard the singing of a voiceless song, no louder than the
winging hum of bees, but vaster--the earth and air responding to a
starry lyre as some Aeolian harper, sweeping through the silvery spaces
of the night, brushed the strings with her robes of jeweled cold.

The mercury stood at zero by one o'clock. A biting wind had risen and
blew all the next day. Eight inches of ice by this time. One night
more and the crop would be ripe. And it was