The ice was very thin, and the holes were perfect disks.

November 19.

Old Mr. Joseph Hosmer, who helped me to-day, said that he used to know all about the lots, but since they’ve chopped off so much, and the woods have grown up, he finds himself lost.

Thirty or forty years ago, when he went to meeting, he knew every face in the meeting-house, even the boys and girls, they looked so much like their parents; but after ten or twelve years they would have outgrown his knowledge entirely (they would have altered so), but he knew the old folks still, because they held their own and didn't alter.

Just so he could tell the boundaries of the old wood which hadn't been cut down, but the young wood altered so much in a few years that he couldn't tell anything about it.

When I asked him why the old road which went by this swamp was so roundabout, he said he would answer me as Mr. __ did him in a similar case once, “Why, if they had made it straight, they wouldn't have left any room for improvement."

Standing by Harrington's pond-hole in the swamp, which had skimmed over, we saw that there were many holes through the thin black ice, of various sizes, from a few inches to more than a foot in diameter, all of which were perfectly circular.

Mr. H. asked me if I could account for it.

As we stood considering, we jarred the boggy ground and made a dimple in the water, and this accident, we thought, betrayed the cause of it; i.e. the circular wavelets so wore off the edges of the ice when once a hole was made.

The ice was very thin, and the holes were perfect disks.

But what jarred the ground and shook the water?

Perhaps the wind which shook the spruce and pine trees which stood in the quaking ground, as well as the little life in the water itself, and the wind on the ice and water itself.

There was a more permanent form created by the dimple, but not yet a shellfish.



H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 19, 1851 

Harrington's pond-hole in the swamp.(aka Harrington’s Mud-hole Harrington’s Pool) -- This boggy pool on the north edge of the Ministerial Swamp is/was notable for its uncommon bog plants – such as Pitcher Plants (Sarracenia purpurea) and Black Spruce (Picea mariana) ~ Thoreau Place Names A Guide to Place Names in Concord and Lincoln, MA in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau compiled by Ray Angelo.  See November 24, 1851 ("Found on the south side of the swamp the Lygodium palmatum, which Bigelow calls the only climbing fern in our latitude, an evergreen"); August 28, 1860 ("The Lycopodium inundatum common by Harrington's mud-hole, Ministerial Swamp.")