When the pond freezes over we experience something of that feeling which comes with the first snow, a delightful sense of novelty, briefly entertained each season. The water has suddenly lost its mobility and become passive and expressionless, as one in a hypnotic state. A great calm has settled upon the earth; the winter sleep is in the air and the ponds have succumbed with the woodchuck. Only the chickadees, scolding and gossiping in the pitch-pines, seem to be awake and unaffected by the change. A cold bluish light pervades the leafless woods, reflected from the snow and appearing to emanate from the ground rather than the sky. The earth is wrapped in silence, yet it is not austere nor repellent. One _feels_ this stillness, which appeals to some sixth sense, and is more acceptable at times than any music,--is itself the most heavenly music. Far across the valley the steam of a passing locomotive rises slowly, and then, like the opening of a flower, unfolds in snow-white voluptuous petals and remains as if carved in the still air. A shaft of light reaches the eye from a distant pool of molten silver at the base of purple hills. All around are little sparkling lights of icicles, flashing their pure rays in the sun. It is the magic water, the protean thing so full of light, laughter and music. Once it was laughter; now in the silence it is light. All at once the pond is alive with skaters, its solitary aspect transformed by this merry invasion. Boys cutting figure eights suggest whirligigs. Myriad black figures, clear cut in the pale light, move in and out with undulating rhythm, as on a surface of polished steel. The pond, now more companionable than ever, becomes a playground, and we never so much as reflect upon the strangeness of it. Something there is in this unbending on the part of Nature which puts us in a good humor, for certainly people are never more good-natured than on the ice. Their habitual stiffness melts away as readily as ice melts in the sun. They experience a thaw and become democratic. To skate over meadows and into inaccessible bogs gives one a taste for exploration. It is a new freedom and perhaps the next thing to flying. Seen through the clear "black" ice, familiar objects have an added interest; the pebbles on the bottom, the spagnum, the lily-pads, all give the impression of being severed from our world, though so plainly in view. The skater glides in and out amongst cassandra and andromeda, clethra and black alders--wintry jungles, enlivened only by red winterberries--where in summer is the haunt of the rose pogonia and the white-fringed orchis. Who would imagine now that the swamp was capable of producing anything so exquisite, that it held beneath the ice the seeds of such beauty?