THIN ICE 



and it will still be unchanged. Stir it 

 faintly and the ice crystals grow across 

 it at the touch. 



Strange to tell, too, the pond's dreams 

 at first were not of the vast universe that 

 lay hollowed out beneath the sky and was 

 repeated to the eye in its clear depths. 

 Its dreams were of earth and warmth, of 

 vaporous days and humid nights when 

 never a frost chill touched its surface the 

 long year through, and the record the 

 little wind wrote in the ice crystals was 

 of the growth of fern frond and palm 

 and prehistoric plant life that grew in 

 tropic luxuriance in the days when the 

 pond was young. 



These first bold, free-hand sketches 

 touched crystal to crystal and joined, em- 

 bossing a strange network of arabesques, 

 plants drawn faithfully, animals of the 

 coal age sketched in and suggested only, 



