October arrived and the narrator began to prepare for the winter months. While admiring the brilliant autumn foliage, he gathered grapes, collected half a bushel of chestnuts, and brought in a small store of wild apples for coddling. Gradually the weather got colder, and when the wasps began flocking into his cabin to hibernate, the narrator decided it was time to move indoors to the warmth of his hearth.
He describes at length how he built his chimney, "the most vital part of the house." As is usual with the narrator, this employment proved to be a source of great enjoyment. He cleansed his second-hand bricks, mixed his own mortar with sand from Walden, and happily engaged himself in the art of masonry. Throughout the winter, the fire in the hearth was like a friend; and once he had finished plastering its walls, the cabin became a comfortable "shell" into which he could withdraw.
While the narrator was completing his cabin, the pond began to freeze. The narrator welcomed the first ice and spent hours studying the bottom of the pond through the glasslike ice, viewing the furrows in the sand, the cases of cadis worms, and other interesting objects. But the ice itself was "the object of most interest." This was so because of the designs which the bubbles formed beneath it. The delight he received from viewing them may be gleaned from the language he uses to describe them: "They were no longer one directly over another, but often like silvery coins poured from a bag, one overlapping another."
Having told us about the beauty of the pond and the comfort of his cabin, the narrator thus begins the story of the winter he spent at Walden Pond.
