📝 您未登录，登录后完成练习可保存成绩、查看最佳记录。
总字符
0
正确字符
0
错误字符
0
错误率
0.00%
耗时(秒)
0
速度 WPM
0
0 / 66
1In the winter of '46-7 there came a hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down on to our pond one morning, with
2many car-loads of ungainly-looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf-knives, spades, saws, rakes, and
3each man was armed with a double-pointed pike-staff, such as is not described in the New-England Farmer or the
4Cultivator. I did not know whether they had come to sow a crop of winter rye, or some other kind of grain recently
5introduced from Iceland. As I saw no manure, I judged that they meant to skim the land, as I had done, thinking the soil
6was deep and had lain fallow long enough. They said that a gentleman farmer, who was behind the scenes, wanted to double
7his money, which, as I understood, amounted to half a million already; but in order to cover each one of his dollars
8with another, he took off the only coat, ay, the skin itself, of Walden Pond in the midst of a hard winter. They went to
9work at once, ploughing, harrowing, rolling, furrowing, in admirable order, as if they were bent on making this a model
10farm; but when I was looking sharp to see what kind of seed they dropped into the furrow, a gang of fellows by my side
11suddenly began to hook up the virgin mould itself, with a peculiar jerk, clean down to the sand, or rather the
12water,--for it was a very springy soil,--indeed all the terra firma there was,--and haul it away on sleds, and then I
13guessed that they must be cutting peat in a bog. So they came and went every day, with a peculiar shriek from the
14locomotive, from and to some point of the polar regions, as it seemed to me, like a flock of arctic snow-birds. But
15sometimes Squaw Walden had her revenge, and a hired man, walking behind his team, slipped through a crack in the ground
16down toward Tartarus, and he who was so brave before suddenly became but the ninth part of a man, almost gave up his
17animal heat, and was glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was some virtue in a stove; or
18sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of steel out of a ploughshare, or a plough got set in the furrow and had to be
19cut out. To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers, came from Cambridge every day to get out the
20ice. They divided it into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and these, being sledded to the shore,
21were rapidly hauled off on to an ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle, worked by horses, on
22to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if they
23formed the solid base of an obelisk designed to pierce the clouds. They told me that in a good day they could get out a
24thousand tons, which was the yield of about one acre. Deep ruts and "cradle holes" were worn in the ice, as on terra
25firma, by the passage of the sleds over the same track, and the horses invariably ate their oats out of cakes of ice
26hollowed out like buckets. They stacked up the cakes thus in the open air in a pile thirty-five feet high on one side
27and six or seven rods square, putting hay between the outside layers to exclude the air; for when the wind, though never
28so cold, finds a passage through, it will wear large cavities, leaving slight supports or studs only here and there, and
29finally topple it down. At first it looked like a vast blue fort or Valhalla; but when they began to tuck the coarse
30meadow hay into the crevices, and this became covered with rime and icicles, it looked like a venerable moss-grown and
31hoary ruin, built of azure-tinted marble, the abode of Winter, that old man we see in the almanac,--his shanty, as if he
32had a design to estivate with us. They calculated that not twenty-five per cent of this would reach its destination, and
33that two or three per cent would be wasted in the cars. However, a still greater part of this heap had a different
34destiny from what was intended; for, either because the ice was found not to keep so well as was expected, containing
35more air than usual, or for some other reason, it never got to market. This heap, made in the winter of '46-7 and
36estimated to contain ten thousand tons, was finally covered with hay and boards; and though it was unroofed the
37following July, and a part of it carried off, the rest remaining exposed to the sun, it stood over that summer and the
38next winter, and was not quite melted till September 1848. Thus the pond recovered the greater part. Like the water, the
39Walden ice, seen near at hand, has a green tint, but at a distance is beautifully blue, and you can easily tell it from
40the white ice of the river, or the merely greenish ice of some ponds, a quarter of a mile off. Sometimes one of those
41great cakes slips from the ice-man's sled into the village street, and lies there for a week like a great emerald, an
42object of interest to all passers. I have noticed that a portion of Walden which in the state of water was green will
43often, when frozen, appear from the same point of view blue. So the hollows about this pond will, sometimes, in the
44winter, be filled with a greenish water somewhat like its own, but the next day will have frozen blue. Perhaps the blue
45color of water and ice is due to the light and air they contain, and the most transparent is the bluest. Ice is an
46interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old
47which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is
48commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect. Thus for sixteen days I saw from my
49window a hundred men at work like busy husbandmen, with teams and horses and apparently all the implements of farming,
50such a picture as we see on the first page of the almanac; and as often as I looked out I was reminded of the fable of
51the lark and the reapers, or the parable of the sower, and the like; and now they are all gone, and in thirty days more,
52probably, I shall look from the same window on the pure sea-green Walden water there, reflecting the clouds and the
53trees, and sending up its evaporations in solitude, and no traces will appear that a man has ever stood there. Perhaps I
54shall hear a solitary loon laugh as he dives and plumes himself, or shall see a lonely fisher in his boat, like a
55floating leaf, beholding his form reflected in the waves, where lately a hundred men securely labored. Thus it appears
56that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In
57the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose
58composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny
59and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its
60sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the
61Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells
62at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our
63buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the
64Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the
65periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of
66the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.
🎉 全部完成！共 66 行