When it blows hardest each successive billow
(four or five feet apart or more) is crowned
with a yellowish or dirty-white foam. The
wind blows around each side of the hill, the
opposite currents meeting, perchance, or it falls
over the hill so that you have a field of ever-
varying color, dark blue, blackish, yellowish,
light blue, smooth sky-blue, purplish, and yel-
lowish foam, all at once. Sometimes the wind
visibly catches up the surface and blows it
along and about in spray four or five feet high.
The requisites are high water, mostly clear of
ice, ground bare and sufficiently dry, weather
warm enough, and wind strong and gusty.
Then you may sit or stand on a hill and watch
the play of the wind with the water. I know
of no checker-board more interesting to watch.
46 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
The wind, the gusts, comb the hair of the water-
nymphs. You never tire of seeing it drop,
spread, and sweep over the yielding and -sensi-
tive surface. The water is full of life, now ris-
ing into higher billows which would make your
mast crack if you had any, now subsiding into
lesser, dashing against and wearing away the
still anchored ice, setting many small cakes
adrift. How they entertain us with ever-chang-
ing scenes in the sky above or on the earth be-
low. If the plowman lean on his plow handle
and look up or down, there is danger that he
will forget his labor on that day.
