Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/52

38 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 sloping 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 geometrical 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, as I noticed yesterday and to-day.