ICE-HOLES IN THE NORTH MOUNTAINS. 29 



to St John did not sail till Monday ; so that I had two 

 days to amuse myself in this neighbourhood. Part of 

 one of these I spent in crossing the bay, and climbing 

 the North Mountains, to visit a spot where I had been 

 told that ice was to be met with all the year round. The 

 day was hot, and the hill steep, and wdien we were fairly 

 in the woods, I occasionally, for a short cut, forsook my 

 guide and the trail, and fell among windfalls, so that I 

 was not a little pleased when he announced our arrival 

 at the spot. A windfall, in the English sense, usually 

 means a bit of good luck ; but when an Englishman gets 

 into an American forest, he will soon unlearn this home 

 sense of the term, and come to class it among unlucky 

 events, with the occurrence of an alder swamp or a Car- 

 riboo bog. 



The spot we had come to was a kind of notch in the 

 side and summit of the mountain, where angular frag- 

 ments and rocky masses of trap were piled one upon 

 another, a little runner flowing down the centre of the 

 notch. The whole was overgrown with mixed timber, 

 chiefly hardwood, the roots of the trees fixing themselves 

 wherever a holding-place among the stones w^as to be 

 found. At various spots a freezing cold air was felt to 

 issue from among the stones ; and, on digging under the 

 fallen leaves among the stony crevices, we succeeded in 

 obtaining some lumps of ice, which, with the water of 

 the brook and a little brandy — a prohibited drink in these 

 parts — formed a refreshing beverage after our fatiguing 

 ascent. This locality resembles those which have been 

 described in different parts of Europe, where ice occurs, 

 even in hot weather, among masses of collected rocky 

 fragments. The air proceeds most probably from caverns 

 in the mountain, which are filled with ice during the 

 long and severe winters of this latitude, and are rarely 

 melted by the warm air that enters them even during a 

 hot and protracted summer. 



