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.
226In 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 elaborately 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 227 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.”
228Just 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 nightfall, 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 229 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 house 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 230 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 that 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 231 him and his sled on an ice-island, in the midst of a 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 232 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 maybe 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.