THE POND IN WINTER. 8ii 
wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only 
here and there, and finally topple it down. At first it 
looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla ; but when they 
began to tuck the coarse meadow hay into the crevices, 
and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked 
like a venerable moss-grown and hoary ruin, built of 
azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man 
we see in the almanac, —- his shanty, as if he had a de¬ 
sign to estivate with us. They calculated that not 
twenty-five per cent, of this would reach its destination, 
and that two or three per cent, would be wasted in the 
cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a 
different destiny from what was intended; for, either be¬ 
cause the ice was found not to keep so well as was ex¬ 
pected, containing more air than usual, or for some other 
reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the 
winter of ’46-7 and estimated to contain ten thousand 
tons, was finally covered with hay and boards ; and 
though it was unroofed the following July, and a part 
of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the 
sun, it stood over that summer and the next winter, and 
was not quite melted till September 1848. Thus the 
pond recovered the greater part. 
Like the water, the Walden ice, seen near at hand, 
has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, 
and you can easily tell it from the white ice of the river, 
or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a 
mile off. Sometimes one of those great cakes slips from 
the ice-man’s sled into the village street, and lies there for 
a week like a great emerald, an object of interest to all 
passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which 
in the state of water was green will often, when frozen, 
appear from the same point of view blue. So the hoi- 
