17 December 1855 – 23 December 1855

This morning it is snowing, and the ground . is whitened. The countless flakes, seen against the dark evergreens like a web that is woven in the air, impart a cheerful and busy aspect to nature. It is like a grain that is sown, or like leaves that have come to clothe the bare trees. Now, by 9 o’clock, it comes down in larger flakes, and I apprehend that it will soon stop. It does. How pleasant a sense of preparedness for the winter, —— plenty of wood in the shed and potatoes and apples, etc., in the cellar, and the house banked up! Now it will be a cheerful sight to see the snows descend and hear the blast howl.

Still no snow, and, as usual, I wear no gloves. P. M. — To Hubbard’s skating meadow. A few chickadees busily inspecting the buds at the willow-row ivy tree, for insects, with a short, clear chink from time to time, as if to warn me of their neighbor- hood. Boys are now devoted to skating after school at night, far into evening, going without their suppers. It is pretty good on the meadows, which are somewhat overflown, and the sides of the river, but the greater part of it is open. I walk along the side of the river, on the ice beyond the Bath Place. Already there is dust on this smooth ice, on its countless facets, revealed by the sun. How warm the dull-red cranberry vine rises above the ice here and there! I stamped and shook the ice to detect the holes and weak places where that little brook comes in there. They were plainly revealed, for the water beneath, being agitated, pro- claimed itself at every hole far and wide or for three or four rods. The edge of the ice toward the channel is either rubbed up or edged with a ridge of frozen foam. I see some gossamer on the weeds above the ice. Also, in now hard, dark ice, the tracks apparently of a fox, made when it was saturated snow. So long his trail is revealed, but over the pastures no hound can now trace him. There has been much overflow about every tussock in the meadow, making that rough, opaque ice, like yeast. I mark the many preparations for another year which the farmer has made, — his late plowings, his muck-heaps in fields, perhaps of grass, which he intends to plow and cultivate, his ditches to carry off the winter’s floods, ete. How placid, like silver or like steel in different lights, the surface of the still, living water between these borders of ice, reflecting the weeds and trees, and now the warm colors of the sunset sky! The ice is that portion of the flood which is congealed and laid up in our fields for a season.

Going to the post-office at 9 a. M. this very pleasant morning, I hear and see tree sparrows on Wheildon’s pines, and just beyond scare a downy woodpecker and a brown creeper in company, from near the base of a small elm within three feet of me. The former dashes off with a loud rippling of the wing, and the creeper flits across the street to the base of another small elm, whither I follow. At first he hides behind the base, but ere long works his way upward and comes in sight. He is a gray-brown, a low curve from point of beak to end of tail, resting flat against the tree. P. M.— Via Hubbard’s Grove and river to Fair Haven Pond. Return by Andromeda Ponds. See only a jay (?) flying high over the fields, and chickadees. ‘The last rarely seem to mind you, keeping busy at work, yet hop nearer and nearer. Hubbard’s barren pasture under Fair Haven Hill, whose surface is much broken, alternate sod and bare sand, is now tinged with the pale leather or cinnamon color of the second-sized pinweed, which thickly covers it. I here take to the riverside. The broader places are frozen over, but I do not trust them yet. Fair Haven is entirely frozen over, probably some days. Already some eager fisherman has been here, this morning or yesterday, and I hear that a great pickerel was carried through the street. I see, close under the high bank on the east side, a distinct tinge of that red in the ice for a rod. I remark the different pale colors to which the grasses have faded and bleached. Those coarse sedges amid the button- bushes are bleached particularly light. Some, more slender, in the Pleasant Meadow, is quite light with singular reddish or pinkish radical blades making a mat at the base. Some dense sedge or rushes in tufts in the Andromeda Ponds ff have a decided greenish tinge, somewhat like well-cured hay. A few simple colors now prevail. Even the apples on the trees have assumed the brown color of the leaves. I do not remember to have seen the Andromeda Ponds so low. ‘The weedy and slimy bottom is for the most part exposed. The slime, somewhat clay- colored, is collected here and there into almost organic forms, — manna{ ?}like, with a skin to it. I make a nosegay of the sphagnum, which must suffer from this unusual exposure. It is frozen stiff at the base. What rugged castellated forms it takes at the base of the andromeda which springs from it! Some is green or yellowish-green, some bright-crimson, some brown, some quite white, with different shades of all these colors. Such are the temples and cheeks of these soft crags. What a primitive and swampy wilderness for the wild mice to run amidst! — the andromeda woods! Walden is skimmed over, all but an acre, in my cove. It will probably be finished to-night.! No doubt the healthiest man in the world is pre- vented from doing what he would like by sickness.

Dull overcast morning, so warm that it has actually thawed in the night, and there is a wet space larger than the ice on the sidewalk. It draws forth crowing from cockerels, as spring does rills from glaciers. P. M. — Warm rain and frost coming out and muddy walking. In reading Columella I am frequently reminded, not only by the general tone, but even by the particular warnings and directions, of our agricultural journals and reports of farmers’ clubs. Often what is last and most insisted on among us, was most insisted on by the Romans. As when he says it is better to cultivate a little land well than a great deal ill, and quotes the poet : — ‘*. .. Laudato ingentia rura, Exiguum colito.” “Modus ergo, qui in omnibus rebus, etiam paran- dis agris adhibebitur: tantum enim obtinendum est, quanto est opus, ut emisse videamur quo potiremur, non quo oneraremur ipsi, atque aliis fruendum eripe- remus, more praepotentium, qui possident fines gen- tium, quos ne circumire equis quidem valent, sed pro- culcandos pecudibus, et vastandos ac populandos feris derelinquunt, aut occupatos nexu civium, et ergastulis tenent.”” (Therefore, as in all things, so in buying land moderation will be used; for only so much is to be obtained as is necessary, to make it appear that we have bought what we can use, not what we may be burdened with, and hinder others from enjoying, like those overpowerful ones who possess the territory of nations, which they cannot go round even with horses, but leave to be trampled by herds, and to be laid waste and depopulated by wild beasts, or keep occupied by nexu civium * and prisons.) This reminds me of those extensive tracts said to belong to the Peter Piper estate, running back a mile or more and absorbing several old farms, but almost wholly neglected and run out, which I often traverse and am better acquainted with than their so-called owners. Several times I have had to show such the nearest way out of their wood-lots.?, Extensive wood-lots and cranberry meadows, perhaps, and a rambling old country house on one side, but you can’t buy an acre of land for a house-lot. “Where wealth accumulates and men decay.”

P. M. — To Conantum-End.