Walden

with the head of my axe, it resounded like a gong for many rods
around, or as if I had struck on a tight drum-head.  The pond began
to boom about an hour after sunrise, when it felt the influence of
the sun's rays slanted upon it from over the hills; it stretched
itself and yawned like a waking man with a gradually increasing
tumult, which was kept up three or four hours.  It took a short
siesta at noon, and boomed once more toward night, as the sun was
withdrawing his influence.  In the right stage of the weather 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
fishermen 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 the buds expand in the spring.  The earth is
all alive and covered with papillae.  The largest pond is as
sensitive to atmospheric 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 honeycombed, 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 exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter
quarters.  On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird,
song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was 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 completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the
middle was merely honeycombed 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, spirited
away.  One year I went across the middle only five days before it
disappeared entirely.  In 1845 Walden 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 particularly 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 thoroughly 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 secrets
between them -- that one spring day he took his gun and boat, and
thought that he would have a little sport with the ducks.  There was
ice still on the meadows, but it was all gone out of the river, and
he dropped down without obstruction from Sudbury, where he lived, to
Fair Haven Pond, which he found, unexpectedly, covered for the most
part with a firm field of ice.  It was a warm day, and he was
surprised to see so great a body of ice remaining.  Not seeing any
ducks, he hid his boat on the north or back side of an island in the
pond, and then concealed himself in the bushes on the south side, to
await them.  The ice was melted for three or four rods from the
shore, and there was a smooth and warm sheet of water, with a muddy
bottom, such as the ducks love, within, and he thought it likely
that some would be along pretty soon.  After he had lain still there
about an hour he heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but
singularly grand and impressive, unlike anything he had ever heard,
gradually swelling and increasing as if it would have a universal
and memorable ending, a sullen rush and roar, which seemed to him
all at once like the sound of a vast body of fowl coming in to
settle there, and, seizing his gun, he started up in haste and
excited; but he found, to his surprise, that the whole body of the
ice had started while he lay there, and drifted in to the shore, and
the sound he had heard was made by its edge grating on the shore --
at first gently nibbled and crumbled off, but at length heaving up
and scattering its wrecks along the island to a considerable height
before it came to a standstill.
    At length the sun's rays have attained the right angle, and warm
winds blow up mist and rain and melt the snowbanks, and the sun,
dispersing the mist, smiles on a checkered landscape of russet and
white smoking with incense, through which the traveller picks his
way from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling
rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter
which they are bearing off.
    Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms
which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a
deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the
village, a phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, though
the number of freshly exposed banks of the right material must have
been greatly multiplied since railroads were invented.  The material
was sand of every degree of fineness and of various rich colors,
commonly mixed with a little clay.  When the frost comes out in the