3 December 1855 – 9 December 1855

Monday. A pleasant day. No snow yet (since that first whitening which lasted so long), nor do I see any ice to speak of. Hear and see, of birds, only a tree sparrow in the willows on the Turnpike. Met Goodwin going out with his gun. He shot (evidently) some crossbills once in Roxbury. He sometimes gets a skunk drowned in his muskrat or mink traps, and so can get at their secre- tion without being disturbed by the scent. He, too, has heard that it is a sure cure for the phthisic. The fields and woods seem now particularly empty and bare. No cattle in pasture; only here and there a man carting or spreading manure. Every larger tree which I knew and admired is being gradually culled out and carried to mill. I see one or two more large oaks in E. Hubbard’s wood lying high on stumps, waiting for snow to be removed. I miss them as surely and with the same feeling that I do the old inhabitants out of the village street. To me they were something more than timber; to their. owner not so.

Melvin says that he shot a sheldrake once in the act of swallowing a perch seven or eight inches long He had got nothing to-day, for he forgot his: caps. al A pleasant day and yet no snow nor ice. The younger osiers on Shattuck’s row do shine.

10 Pp. M. — Hear geese going over.

Saturday. Still no snow, — nor ice notice- able. I might have left my boat out till now. I have not worn gloves yet. This afternoon I go to the woods down the railroad, seeking the society of some flock of little birds, or some squirrel, but in vain. I only hear the faint lisp of (prob- ably) a tree sparrow. I go through empty halls, appar- ently unoccupied by bird or beast. Yet it is cheering to walk there while the sun is reflected from far through the aisles with a silvery light from the needles of the pine. The contrast of light or sunshine and shade, though the latter is now so thin, is food enough for me. Some scarlet oak leaves on the forest floor, when I stoop low, appear to have a little blood in them still. The shrivelled Solomon’s-seal berries are conspicu- ously red amid the dry leaves. I visited the door of many a squirrel’s burrow, and saw his nutshells and cone-scales and tracks in the sand, but a snow would reveal much more. Let a snow come and clothe the ground and trees, and I shall see the tracks of many inhabitants now unsuspected, and the very snow cov- ering up the withered leaves will supply the place of the green ones which are gone.’ In a little busy flock of lisping birds, — chickadees or lesser redpolls, — even in a nuthatch or downy woodpecker, there would have been a sweet society for.me, but I did not find [it]. Yet I had the sun penetrating into the deep hollows through the aisles of the wood, and the silvery sheen of its reflection from masses of white pine needles. Met Therien coming from Lincoln on the railroad. He says that he carried a cat from Jacob Baker’s to Riordan’s shanty in a bag in the night, but she ran home again. “Had they not a cat in the shanty?” I asked. “Yes,” said he, “but she was run over by the cars and killed; they found her head on the track separated from her body, just below the pond.” That cat of Baker’s used to eat eggs and so he wished to get rid of her. He carried her in a bag to Waltham, but she came back. Therien had several times seen where tortoises had been run over. They lie just under the rail, and put their heads out upon the rail to see what is coming, and so their heads are crushed. Also he has seen snakes cut in two. The men on the road told him that small birds were frequently run over. Jacob Farmer brought me the head of a mink to- night and took tea here. He says that partridges some- times fly against a house in the night, he thinks when started by a fox. His man found one in his barn this fall, which had come in in the night, and caught it before it could get out. The mink has a delicate pard-like nose, cat-like. The long hairs are black or blackish, yet the general aspect is brown. Farmer says he can call a male quail close to him by imitating the note of the female, which is only a single faint whistle. He says if you take eggs out of a partridge’s nest and put them back, you will find just as many cast out afterwards as you took out.

A still, completely gray, overcast, chilly morning. At 8.30 a fine snow begins to fall, increasing very gradually, perfectly straight down, till in fifteen min- utes the ground is white, the smooth places first, and thus the winter landscape is ushered in. And now it is falling thus all the land over, sifting down through the tree-tops In woods, and on the meadow and pastures, where the dry grass and weeds conceal it at first, and on the river and ponds, in which it is dissolved. But in a few minutes it turns to rain, and so the wintry landscape is postponed for the present.