Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/37

This page has been validated.
EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
23

storm, we must be out a long time and travel far in it, so that it may fairly penetrate our skin, and we be, as it were, turned inside out to it, and there be no part in us but is wet or weather-beaten, so that we become storm-men, instead of fair-weather men. Some men speak of having been wet to the skin once as a memorable event in their lives which, notwithstanding the croakers, they survived.

February 28, 1855. I observed how a new ravine was formed in that last thaw at Clamshell Hill. Much melted snow and rain being collected on the top of the hill, some apparently found its way through the ground frozen a foot thick, a few feet from the edge of the bank, and began with a small rill washing down the slope the unfrozen sand beneath. As the water continued to flow, the sand on each side continued to slide into it and be carried off, leaving the frozen crust above quite firm, making a bridge five or six feet wide over this cavern. Now since the thaw, this bridge, I see, has melted and fallen in, leaving a ravine some ten feet wide and much longer, which now may go on increasing from year to year without limit. I was there just after it began.

February 28, 1856. How simple the machinery of a saw-mill. M—— has dammed a stream, raised a pond or head of water, and placed an