This sudden change of the leafless woods to glowing
silver was, like the great aurora, spoken of for years, and is one of
the most beautiful of the many pictures that enriches my life. And
besides the great shows there were thousands of others even in the
coldest weather manifesting the utmost fineness and tenderness of
beauty and affording noble compensation for hardship and pain.
One of the most striking of the winter sounds was the loud roaring and
rumbling of the ice on our lake, from its shrinking and expanding
with the changes of the weather. The fishermen who were catching
pickerel said that they had no luck when this roaring was going on
above the fish. I remember how frightened we boys were when on one of
our New Year holidays we were taking a walk on the ice and heard for
the first time the sudden rumbling roar beneath our feet and running
on ahead of us, creaking and whooping as if all the ice eighteen or
twenty inches thick was breaking.
In the neighborhood of our Wisconsin farm there were extensive swamps
consisting in great part of a thick sod of very tough carex roots
covering thin, watery lakes of mud.
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