316 
WALDEN. 
that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came 
and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the lo¬ 
comotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as 
it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But 
sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired 
man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack 
in the ground down toward Tartarus, and he who 
was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part 
of a man, almost gave up his animal heat, and was glad 
to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there 
was some virtue in a stove ; or sometimes the frozen 
soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a 
plough got set in the furrow and had to be cut out. 
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee 
overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out 
the ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well 
known to require description, and these, being sledded to 
the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and 
raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked 
by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels 
of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row 
upon row, as if they formed the solid base of an obelisk 
designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in 
a good day they could get out a thousand tons, which 
was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and “ cradle 
holes ” were worn in the ice, as on terra jftrma, by the 
passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses 
invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice hollowed 
out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in 
the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side 
and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the 
outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, 
though never so cold, finds a passage through, it will 
