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The first object brought to light, about two feet beneath the surface, was a piece of dark gray woolen stuff which, when the mold was removed, proved to be part of a woman's skirt. With frantic eagerness I got into the hole we had made and removed the soil with my hands, until I suddenly touched something hard. A body lay there, doubled up and crushed into the well-like hole the men had dug.
"Look here," cried Fred, "you say another word about it, and I'll throw all the water over you." "Let's make haste, then, and go and find the way in before breakfast." For answer Fred scooped away at such a rate that he had soon cleared the boat down to the little well-like hollow arranged to catch the drainings. "Now then," he cried, "I'm tired. You row."
A faint voice of running water was heard near by, and, following the sound, a delicious spring rivulet was disclosed, hidden by the moss and debris as by a new fall of snow, but here and there rising in little well-like openings, as if for our special convenience. What other qualities of the naturalist does Burroughs show in this account? What things in nature seem most to attract his attention?
We have one other pond just like this, White Pond in Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly; but, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within a dozen miles of this center, I do not know a third of this pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance have drunk at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away, and still its water is green and pellucid as ever.
Having freed the daylight, he leaned out, peering greedily down into the well-like court, where even the stunted trees in their painted tubs were coated white with rime; then, with another impulse, as quickly conceived, as quickly executed, he drew back into the room, fired with the desire to be out and about in this newly created world.
In other places the muskrats contented themselves with merely having a well-like place under their little houses. While some of them were deep enough to save them from the wild cats or wolverines, they were not sufficient to save them from the spears of our boys and Indians.
One season a wood duck laid her eggs in a cavity in the top of a tall yellow birch near the spring that supplies my cabin with water. A bold climber "shinned" up the fifty or sixty feet of rough tree-trunk and looked in upon the eleven eggs. They were beyond the reach of his arm, in a well-like cavity over three feet deep.
Down in the narrow lanes and the well-like courtyards the children stamped about in the snowy slush and sang to the sun which they could not see. People began to recover from the long privations of the winter. The cold might return at any moment; but all were united in their belief in the spring.
The chalk formation extends all round my house in Kent; and its surface, from having been exposed during an immense period to the dissolving action of rain-water, is extremely irregular, being abruptly festooned and penetrated by many deep well-like cavities.
Galleries at different levels are connected by well-like pits, some of which measure two hundred and twenty-five feet from top to bottom. Through some of the lowest of these tunnels flows Echo River, still at work dissolving and wearing away the rock while on its dark way to appear at the surface as a great spring.