[figure description] Page 225.[end figure description]

Casualties will occur; there is no providing
against the infinite chapter of accidents. We have
met with a misfortune. Our country horse is dead.
Much as we grieved over him living, still we
cannot help brooding over his untimely fate.
After all, sympathy, pity, tenderness, are inexplicable
virtues; why should such a loss cast its little
cloud over our domestic sun, when greater, more
pitiable events, fail to affect us? Our horse is
dead! Well, he was not worth his fodder, yet we
sorrow for him. The loss of fifty thousand
Russians at Kars or Erzeroum, would not, could
not, touch us so nearly. This is a strange instrument—
the human heart! An organ with unaccountable
stops—a harp of a thousand strings,
many of them, I fear me, deplorably short.

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In the winter time, when the frost builds its
transparent flooring over the ponds, it is customary
to fill the ice-houses in the country. It is a
good thing to have an ice-house in the country.
You keep your summer Sunday dinner, your milk,
and your butter, in great perfection, if you have
such a frigid tabernacle. Sometimes, on a sultry
day, it is pleasant to descend to its cool depths—
to feel a winter atmosphere in the heart of the dog-days—
to enjoy a sparry arctic in the midst of a
flowery tropic. To build a good ice-house, you
must have foresight, and a capable carpenter. In
China they rear them above ground; say a circle of
bamboo poles lashed together; at the top, thatched
over with straw, and a few feet of earth thrown up
around the base; these keep the ice, even until the
next year. Here, where ornate architecture is a
necessity, ice-houses are more claborately structured.
What with a cupola, and a bracketted roof,
knobs, and balls, and bells, a very pretty temple
can be made of pagoda pattern, but then, it must
be conceded, not so well calculated to resist a
heavy thaw in July, as others of plainer mould.

Our ice-house, however, is not of the ornate
kind; nor is it of the conservative species. In

[figure description] Page 227.[end figure description]

style, it is of the super-and-sub-terranean order
of architecture, and really holds its own quite
comfortably—except in very hot weather. We
fill it usually in December, and this season our
horse was brought forth in all his harness, to draw
the clear blue blocks from Baldwin's haunted pond,
upon a strong sled;—we supposed he could perform
that duty with credit to himself. So we thought,
“Alas poor Yorick!”

Baldwin's pond is a vast sheet of water, in truth
it is The Nepperhan River dammed up; and
around its legended brink there are villas, and
gardens, and noble trees, and wild vines, and a
couple of hat factories, and, just below it, a waterfall,
and, in the distance, Chicken Island, and
beyond that a bridge, and further on a gate, with a
broad arch above it, through which you enter the
village. In the summer time its sweet seclusion
would enchant Kensett; in winter its picturesqueness
would arrest Gignoux. The pond in December
is a mine of wealth to the teamsters, as there
are scores of ice-houses to be filled in the village;
and from the transparent clearness of its waters, it
makes pure, blue ice, valuable to pack, and to
keep, and to use. “Alas poor Yorick!”

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Just above it is `The Glen,' which in autumn is
the wildest and grandest place imagination can
conceive of, with its proud abundance of foliage in
such profusion of color, that nature's opulence itself
seems to be there exhausted in tints. As you
stand upon its western shore, and look across the
pond, you see opposite, THE HOUSE WITH THE STONE
CHIMNEY, nestled down among the frowzy willows,
and just beyond that again, is the road that skirts
the river, and if you follow that for a short distance
you will come to the upper pond, over which
hangs the double arch of the aqueduct.

The pond is a great resort for skaters in the
winter, and sometimes of a moonlight evening, its
white floor is a scene of enchantment, with the
phantom-like crowd, whirling and shifting, in a
maze of light and shadow. To and from this pond
our poor old horse, with his rude sled, had been
travelling all day, really earning his feed, and
establishing a reputation for himself of the most
creditable nature, when it chanced, towards night-fall,
there befell him an accident.

In getting out the blocks of ice, the men had
worked down towards the dam, making a sort of
basin of water, which reached from the centre of

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the frozen sheet to the brink of the fall, and projecting
into this tiny bay was a tongue, or peninsula
of ice, connected with the main sheet over the
upper, or northern part of the pond. Upon this
narrow peninsula the sled was backed, with the rear
end close to the open water, our poor horse standing
with his back towards it also; unconscious of
the fate which was awaiting him. In this position
he had stood hour after hour, as block after block
had been hauled up from the water, until his load
was completed, and then straining at his cracking
harness until the half-frozen runners of the sled
slipped from their icy grooves, away he would go
with his crystal freight, to fill up the ice-house. It
seems, however, that, by reason of the continued
cold weather, the blocks of ice were unusually
thick, and heavy, so that hauling them out of the
basin by hand labor, was very severe upon the
men, but, as it chanced, there came a good Samaritan
to the pond, towards the close of the day, who
seeing the men so hard at work, bethought him of
a remedy which was in the village, in the shape of
a “derrick.” Now a derrick is an instrument well
known upon our coasts, and in our larger cities, but
not so common in the country. It is a frame-work

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of timber that stands up upright, sometimes upon
two legs, sometimes upon three or four, and at the
top of the upright beams there is a long cross-piece,
like the mizen yard of a ship, and at the end of the
yard-arm, a block and tackle. Of course it would
be quite easy with this engine to raise the largest
lumps from the water, so some of the men went to
bring it to the pond upon a sled, while others
ceased hauling the ice, and gave up working until
it arrived to assist them. In a short time the men
returned, and at once they were hard enough at
work, raising the derrick upright on the unbroken
sheet of ice, just over against, and parallel with, the
peninsula, upon which our poor horse, with his
empty sled was standing, patiently waiting for his
load. Once or twice he was seen to give the huge
instrument an ominous glance, so that one of the
men walked up to hold his head, for fear he would
take fright and run away from it. Pity he had
not. Up it rose portentous in the air, got almost to
its place, stood for a moment straight up, then
leaned over the other side, slipped upon the ice—
there was a cry “Get out of the way!”—and down
rushed the derrick with a thunderous blow that
broke off our poor horse's peninsula, and launched

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him and his sled on an ice-island, in the midst
of the basin of water. For a short time he kept his
footing upon the island, but the end upon which he
was standing gradually sank into the water, until
he slid into the cool element, and then, instead
of swimming towards the unbroken ice, where he
would have found assistance, he turned down
stream, and towing his sled behind him, reached at
last the edge of the mill-dam. There, after some
struggles, he managed to get one fore leg over the
brink, and so hung, in spite of all persuasion,
his nostrils throbbing with terror, his neck smoking
with cold, and his one pitiful eye looking wistfully
toward the crowd that had betrayed him. Had
there been a boat he might have been saved, but
there was none near, except a skiff, both filled
with, and bedded in, a solid mass of ice, near the
shore. The water was pouring over the dam, so
that no one could approach him from below, nor
could living man walk upon its slippery edge.
They tried to throw a slip-noose over his neck, but
without success; they held a sieve of oats in the
most tempting way towards him, but he shook his
head. At last, when all efforts to save him proved
unavailing, an old sea-captain who had commanded

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a Nepperhan sloop in the last war, and had seen
service, was touched with pity; he sent for his
gun. The old fellow's hand shook as he loaded
it, but he loaded it deliberately, took excellent aim,
fired, and, amid a thousand echoes, the head of our
poor old horse was thrown up in the air for a
moment, and then it dropped upon the brink of the
dam. There it lay, in the midst of the waters—
stirring from side to side with the ripples that
poured over the edge—so life-like in its motions,
that some said “he must yet live;” but it was not
so, and the next morning it was firmly set in an icy
collar, and to this day he may be seen looking over
the mill-dam, as you approach Baldwin's pond,
from the south, by way of Chicken Island, or as
you come up the road, hard by THE HOUSE WITH THE
STONE CHIMNEY.

FEBRUARY, 1856.

p529-242

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