“The water and ice are strangely agitated, it appears to me,” observed Woodburn to his companions, as they stood looking on the scene before them. “See how like a pot the water boils up through that crevice yonder! Then hear that swift, lumbering rush of the stream beneath! The whole river, indeed, seems fairly to groan, like some huge animal confined down by an insupportable burden, from which it is laboring to free itself. I have noticed such appearances, I think, when the ice was on the point of breaking up; but that can hardly be the case here, at present can it?”
“On the point of breaking up, now?” said one of the company in reply. “No, indeed! Why, the ice is more than three feet thick, and as sound and solid as a rock. Should it rain from this time till to-morrow noon, it won't start.”
“Well, now, I don't know about that,” remarked an observant old settler, who had been silently regarding the different portents to which we have alluded. “I don't know about the ice staying here twenty hours, or even one. This has been no common thaw, that we have had for the last six or eight hours, let me tell you.”
“And still,” observed Woodburn, “I should not think the water high enough as yet to cause a breaking up, should you?”
“With a slow rise, and in a still time, perhaps not, Harry. But when the water is rising rapidly, as now, and especially if there is a strong wind, like this, to increase the motion, as it does either by outward pressure, or by forcing the air through the chinks in under the ice, I have always noticed that the stream acts on the ice at a much less height, and much more powerfully, than when the rise is slow and the weather calm.”
“Then you look upon the appearances I named as indications that such an event is soon to take place here, do you?”
“I do, Harry, much sooner than you are expecting; for the signs you name are not the only ones which tell that story, as I will soon convince you all, if you will be still and listen a moment.”
This remark caused the company to pause and place themselves in a listening attitude.
“There,” resumed the speaker, pointing up to the bold, shaggy steeps of the mountain, which we have before alluded to, and which, from the opposite side of the Connecticut, and within a few furlongs from the spot where they now stood, rose, half concealed in its “misty shroud,” like some huge battlement, to the heavens—“there! do you hear that dull roar, with occasionally a crashing sound, away up there among those clouds of fog near the top peaks of the mountain?”
“Ay, ay, quite distinctly.”