Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/35

Rh earth, and we see its blue arteries pulsing with new life now. I see from far over the meadows white cakes of ice gliding swiftly down the stream,—a novel sight. They are whiter than ever in this spring sun.

The abundance of light, as reflected from clouds and the snow, etc., etc., is more springlike than anything else of late I had noticed for some time, far in the middle of the great meadows, something dazzling white, which I took, of course, to be a small cake of ice on its end; but now that I have climbed the pitch pine hill, and can overlook the whole meadow, I see it to be the white breast of a small sheldrake accompanied, perhaps, by its mate, a darker one. They have settled warily in the very midst of the meadow, where the wind has blown a space of clear water for an acre or two. The aspect of the meadow is sky blue and dark blue, the former a thin ice, the latter the spaces of open water which the wind has made; but it is chiefly ice still. Thus as soon as the river breaks up, or begins to break up fairly, and the strong wind, widening the cracks, makes at length open spaces in the ice of the meadow, this hardy bird appears, and is seen sailing in the first widened crack in the ice where it can come at the water. Instead of a piece of ice I find it to be the breast of the