HOUSE-WARMING. 
265 
shadiest and shallowest coves, some days or even weeks 
before the general freezing. The first ice is especially 
interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transpar¬ 
ent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for 
examining the bottom where it is shallow; for you can# 
lie at your length on ice only an inch thick, like a ska¬ 
ter insect on the surface of the water, and study the bot¬ 
tom at your leisure, only two or three inches distant, like 
a picture behind a glass, and the water is necessarily al¬ 
ways smooth then. There are many furrows in the 
sand where some creature has travelled about and 
doubled on its tracks; and, for wrecks, it is strewn with 
the cases of cadis worms made of minute grains of white 
quartz. Perhaps these have creased it, for you find 
some of their cases in the furrows, though they are deep 
and broad for them to make. But the ice itself is the 
object of most interest, though you must improve the 
earliest opportunity to study it. If you examine it 
closely the morning after it freezes, you find that the 
greater part of the bubbles, which at first appeared to 
be within it, are against its under surface, and that more 
are continually rising from the bottom; while the ice is 
as yet comparatively solid and dark, that is, you see the 
water through it. These bubbles are from an eightieth 
to an eighth of an inch in diameter, very clear and beau¬ 
tiful, and you see your face reflected in them through 
the ice. There may be thirty or forty of them to a 
square inch. There are also already within the ice nar¬ 
row oblong perpendicular bubbles about half an inch 
long, sharp cones with the apex upward; or oftener, if 
the ice is quite fresh, minute spherical bubbles one di¬ 
rectly above another, like a string of beads. But these 
within the ice are not so numerous nor obvious as those 
