324 
WALDEN. 
still nearly a foot thick. As the weather grew warmer, 
it was not sensibly worn away by the water, nor broken 
up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it was com¬ 
pletely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, 
the middle was merely honey-combed and saturated 
with water, so that you could put your foot through it 
when six inches thick; but by the next day evening, 
perhaps, after a warm rain followed by fog, it would 
have wholly disappeared, all gone off with the fog, spir¬ 
ited away. One year I went across the middle only 
five days before it disappeared entirely. In 1845 Wal¬ 
den was first completely open on the 1st of April; in 
’46, the 25th of March; in ’47, the 8th of April; in ’51, 
the 28th of March; in ’52, the 18th of April; in ’53, the 
23d of March; in ’54, about the 7th of April. 
Every incident connected with the breaking up of the 
rivers and ponds and the settling of the weather is par¬ 
ticularly interesting to us who live in a climate of so 
great extremes. When the warmer days come, they 
who dwell near the river hear the ice crack at night 
with a startling whoop as loud as artillery, as if its icy 
fetters were rent from end to end, and within a few days 
see it rapidly going out. So the alligator comes out of 
the mud with quakings of the earth. One old man, who 
has been a close observer of Nature, and seems as thor¬ 
oughly wise in regard to all her operations as if she had 
been put upon the stocks when he was a boy, and he 
had helped to lay her keel,—who has come to his 
growth, and can hardly acquire more of natural lore if 
he should live to the age of Methuselah,—told me, and 
I was surprised to hear him express wonder at any of 
Nature’s operations, for I thought that there were no se¬ 
crets between them, that one spring day he took his gun 
