To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold storage--that seems to
me the thing.

I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; or
is it not rather that I crowd a year into a day? Such days are
possible. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. Ice-day is
a chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day of
First Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay is
made when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but ice
of the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right for
harvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult as
to make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June. June! why, June knows
no such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of the ice.

This year it fell early in February--rather late in the season; so
late, in fact, that, in spite of my faith in winter, I began to grow
anxious--something no one on a hill in Hingham need ever do. Since New
Year's Day unseasonable weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain
skies, rain and snow and sleet--that soft, spongy weather when the ice
soaks and grows soggy. By the middle of January what little ice there
had been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house was still empty.

Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the wind
settled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen over
the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear the
close-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars.
Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of the
garden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillside
pines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle
silence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the taut