prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle warning of night
coming on. Twelve times one are twelve--by so many times are months
and meanings and values multiplied for him whose fourteen acres bring
forth abundantly--provided that the barns on the place be kept safely
small.

Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, and without place on a wise
man's estate. As birds have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have
a place to lay his head, with a _mansion_ prepared in the sky for his
soul.

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns of
an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say
to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat,
drink, and be merry among the cakes"--and when the autumn comes he
still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out!
No soul can be merry long on ice--nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks,
nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities. He who builds
great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice must
never become a man's only crop; for then winter means nothing but ice;
and the year nothing but winter; for the year's never at the spring for
him, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercury
is down to zero.

As I have already intimated, a safe kind of ice-house is one like mine,
that cannot hold more than eighteen tons--a year's supply (shrinkage
and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for). Such an ice-house
is not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal of
confidence in the stability of the frame of things, and in their
orderly continuance. Another winter will come, it proclaims, when the