February 13
The rain has diminished the snow and hardened the crust, and made bare ground in many places. A yellow water, a foot or two deep, covers the ice on the meadows, but is not frozen quite hard enough to bear.
As the river swells, the ice cracks along both sides over the edge of its channel, often defined by willows, and that part of the river rises with the water.
I now sit by the little brook in Conant's meadow, where it falls over an oak rail between some boards that partially dam it, - eight or nine inches. Bubbles on the surface make a coarse foam. These bubbles closely push up and crowd one another, each making haste to expand and burst. It is difficult to count them, they are so restless and burst so soon. In one place this froth had been frozen into the form of little hollow towers larger at top than at bottom, six inches high, and the bubbles are now incessantly rising through and bursting at their top, - overflowing with bubbles.
Deeper bubbles are formed by air being carried down by the force of this little fall and mixed with the water. These rise up further down and are flattened against the transparent ice, through which they appear like coins poured out of a miser's pot, hesitating at first which way to troop. Coins of all sizes from a pin-head to a dollar, the coin-like bubbles of the brook.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 13, 1852
I now sit by the little brook in Conant's meadow, where it falls over an oak rail between some boards that partially dam it, - eight or nine inches. Bubbles on the surface make a coarse foam. These bubbles closely push up and crowd one another, each making haste to expand and burst. It is difficult to count them, they are so restless and burst so soon. In one place this froth had been frozen into the form of little hollow towers larger at top than at bottom, six inches high, and the bubbles are now incessantly rising through and bursting at their top, - overflowing with bubbles.
Deeper bubbles are formed by air being carried down by the force of this little fall and mixed with the water. These rise up further down and are flattened against the transparent ice, through which they appear like coins poured out of a miser's pot, hesitating at first which way to troop. Coins of all sizes from a pin-head to a dollar, the coin-like bubbles of the brook.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 13, 1852
The rain has diminished the snow and hardened the crust. See February 13, 1856 ("A very firm and thick, uneven crust, on which I go in any direction across the fields, stepping over the fences."); February 13, 1859 ("Winter comes to make walking possible where there was no walking in summer."); February 28, 1856 ("I go on the crust which we have had since the 13th, i. e. on the solid frozen snow, which settles very gradually in the sun, across the fields and brooks.")
As the river swells, the ice cracks along both sides over the edge of its channel, . . . and that part of the river rises with the water. See February 1, 1855 ("Apparently the thin recent ice of the night, which connects the main body with the shore, bends and breaks with the rising of the mass, especially in the morning, under the influence of the sun and wind, and the water establishes itself at a new level.”)
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