SPRING. 
323 
drawing his influence. In the right stage of the weath¬ 
er a pond fires its evening gun with great regularity. 
But in the middle of the day, being full of cracks, and 
the air also being less elastic, it had completely lost its 
resonance, and probably fishes and muskrats could not 
then have been stunned by a blow on it. The fisher¬ 
men say that the “ thundering of the pond ” scares the 
fishes and prevents their biting. The pond does not 
thunder every evening, and I cannot tell surely when to 
expect its thundering; but though I may perceive no 
difference in the weather, it does. Who would have 
suspected so large and cold and thick-skinned a thing to 
be so sensitive ? Yet it has its law to which it thunders 
obedience when it should as surely as ^he buds expand 
in the spring. The earth is all alive and covered with 
papilla. The largest pond is as sensitive to atmos¬ 
pheric changes as the globule of mercury in its tube. 
One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that 
I should have leisure and opportunity to see the spring 
come in. The ice in the pond at length begins to be 
honey-combed, and I can set my heel in it as I walk. 
Fogs and rains and warmer suns are gradually melting 
the snow; the days have grown sensibly longer; and I 
see how I shall get through the winter without adding 
to my wood-pile, for large fires are no longer necessary. 
I am on the alert for the first signs of spring, to hear 
the chance note of some arriving bird, or the striped 
squirrel’s chirp, for his stores must be now nearly ex¬ 
hausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his win¬ 
ter quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard 
the bluebird* song-sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was 
