38 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
the sun. Over brooks and ditches, perhaps, and 
in many other places, the ice, sometimes a foot 
thick, is shoved (?) or puffed up in the form 
of a peat roof, in some places three feet high 
and stretching twenty or thirty rods. There is 
certainly more ice than could lie flat there, as 
if the adjacent masses had been moved toward 
each other. Yet this general motion is not 
likely, and it is more probably the result of 
the expansion of the ice under the sun, and of 
the warmth of the water (?) there. In many 
places the ice is dark and transparent, and 
you see plainly the bottom on which it lies. 
The various figures in the partially rotted ice 
are very interesting, white bubbles, which look 
like coins of various sizes overlapping each 
other, parallel waving lines, with sometimes 
very slight intervals on the underside of slop¬ 
ing white ice, marking the successive levels at 
which the water has stood; also countless white 
cleavages, perpendicular or inclined, straight 
and zigzag, meeting and crossing each other at 
all possible angles, and making all kinds of geo¬ 
metrical figures, checkering the whole surface 
like white frills or ruffles in the ice. At length 
it melts on the edge of these cleavages into 
little gutters which catch the snow. There is 
the greatest noise from the cracking of the ice 
about 10 A. M., as I noticed yesterday and to- 
day. 
