24 December 1855 – 30 December 1855

9 a. M. — Snow driving almost horizontally from the northeast and fast whitening the ground, and with it the first tree sparrows I have noticed in the yard. It turns partly to rain and hail at midday.

After snow, rain, and hail yesterday and last night, we have this morning quite a glaze, there being at last an inch or two of crusted snow on the ground, the most we have had. The sun comes out at 9 a. M. and lights up the ice-incrusted trees, but it is pretty warm and the ice rapidly melts. I go to Walden via the almshouse and up the railroad. Trees seen in the west against the dark cloud, the sun shining on them, are perfectly white as frostwork, and their outlines very perfectly and distinctly revealed, great wisps that they are and ghosts of trees, with recurved twigs. The walls and fences are encased, and the fields bristle with a myriad of crystal spears. Already the wind is rising and a brattling is heard overhead in the street. The sun, shining down a gorge over the woods at Brister’s Hill, reveals a wonderfully brilliant as well as seemingly solid and diversified re- gion in the air. ‘The ice is from an eighth to a quarter of an inch thick about the twigs and pine-needles, only half as thick commonly on one side. Their heads are bowed; their plumes and needles are stiff, as if pre- served under glass for the inspection of posterity. Thus is our now especially slow-footed river laid up not merely on the meadows, but on the twigs and leaves of the trees, on the needles of the pines. The pines thus weighed down are sharp-pointed at top and remind me of firs and even hemlocks, their drooping boughs being wrapped about them like the folds of a cloak or a shawl. The crust is already strewn with bits of the green needles which have been broken off. Frequently the whole top stands up bare, while the middle and lower branches are drooping and massed together, resting on one an- other. But the low and spreading weeds in the fields and the wood-paths are the most interesting. Here are asters, savory- leaved, whose flat imbricated calyxes, three quarters of an inch over, are sur- mounted and inclosed in a perfectly transparent ice button, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx. These are very common. Each little blue-curls calyx has a spherical button like those brass ones on little boys’ jackets, — little sprigs on them,—and the pennyroyal has still smaller spheres, more regularly arranged about its stem, chandelier-wise, and still smells through the ice. The finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice and most branched on their minute threads. These weeds are spread and arched over into the snow again, — count- less little arches a few inches high, each cased in ice, which you break with a tinkling crash at each step. wen Pa tod Se a os The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of. a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all, for the scarlet is increased and multiplied by reflection through the bubbles and hemispherical surfaces of the crust, as if it covered some vermilion grain thickly strewn. And the brown cup lichens stand in their midst. The whole rough bark, too, is encased. Already a squirrel has perforated the crust above the mouth of his burrow, here and there by the side of the path, and left some empty acorn shells on the snow. He has shovelled out this morning before the snow was frozen on his door-step. Now, at 10 a. M., there blows a very strong wind from the northwest, and it grows cold apace. 1855) AN ICE-INCRUSTED WORLD 63 Particularly are we attracted in the winter by green- ness and signs of growth, as the green and white shoots of grass and weeds, pulled or floating on the water, and also by color, as cockspur lichens and crimson birds, etc. Thorny bushes look more thorny than ever; each thorn is prolonged and exaggerated. Some boys have come out to a wood-side hill to coast. It must be sport to them, lying on their stom- achs, to hear their sled cronching the crystalled weeds when they have reached the more weedy pasture below. 4 p.m. — Up railroad. Since the sun has risen higher and fairly triumphed over the clouds, the ice has glistened with all the pris- matic hues. On the trees it is now considerably dis- sipated, but rather owing to the wind than the sun. The ice is chiefly on the upper and on the storm side of twigs, etc. The whole top of the pine forest, as seen miles off in the horizon, is of sharp points, the leading shoots with a few plumes, even more so than I have drawn on the last page but one. It has grown cold, and the crust bears. The weeds and grasses, being so thickened by this coat of ice, appear much more numerous in the fields. It is sur- prising what a bristling crop they are. ‘The sun is gone before five. Just before I looked for rainbow flocks in the west, but saw none, — only some small pink-dun (?) clouds. In the east still larger ones, which after sunset turned to pale slate.

Recalled this evening, with the aid of Mother, the various houses (and towns) in which I have lived and some events of my life. Born, July 12, 1817, in the Minott House, on the Virginia Road, where Father occupied Grandmother’s thirds, car- rying on the farm. ‘The Catherines the other half of the house. Bob Catherines and John threw up the turkeys. Lived there about eight months. Si Merriam next neigh- bor. Uncle David died when I was six weeks old. I was baptized in old M. H. by Dr. Ripley, when I was three months, and did not cry. The Red House, where Grandmother lived, we the west side till October, 1818, hiring of Josiah Davis, agent for Wood- wards. (There were Cousin Charles and Uncle C. more or less.) Accord- Chelmsford, Pope’s House, ing to day-book, Father hired of Proctor, October 16, 1818, and shop of Spaulding, November 10, 1818. Day-book first used by Grandfather, dated 1797. His part cut out and used by Father in Concord in 1808-9, and in Chelmsford, 1818-19-20-21. till March, 1821. (Last charge in Chelmsford about middle of March, 1821.) Aunt Sarah taught me to walk there when fourteen months old. Lived next the meeting-house, where they kept the powder in the garret. Father kept shop and painted signs, etc. at South End in Boston, five or six (?) months, a ten-footer. Moved from Chelmsford through Concord, and may have tarried in Concord a little while. Day-book says, “Moved to Pinkney Street Sep 10th 1821 on Monday.”’ Whitwell’s House, Pinckney Street, Boston, to March, Brick House, Davis’s House Shattuck House (Hollis Hall, Cambridge) Aunt’s House, 1823 (?). Concord, to spring of 1826. (next to S. Hoar’s) to May ‘7th, 1827. (now William Monroe’s) to spring of 1835. (Hollis, Cambridge, 1833.) to spring of 1837. At Brownson’s 66 (Hollis Hall and Canton) Parkman House, (Hollis, Cambridge) (R. W. E.’s) (William Emer- son’s, Staten Is- land) while teaching in winter of 1835. Went to New York with Father, peddling, in 1836. to fall of 1844. Was graduated in 1837. Kept town school a fortnight in 1837 (?). Began the big Red Journal, October, 1837. Found first arrowheads, fall of 1837. Wrote a lecture (my first) on Society, March 14th, 1838, and read it before the Lyceum in the Masons’ Hall, April 11th, 1838. Went to Maine for a school in May, 1838. Com- menced school in the house in summer of 1838. Wrote an essay on Sound and Silence, December, 1838. Fall of 1839 up Merrimack to White Mountains. “Aulus . Per- sius Flaccus,”’ first printed paper of consequence, February 10th, 1840. The Red Journal of 546 pages ended, June, 1840. Journal of 396 pages ended January 31st, 1841. Went to R. W. E.’s in spring of 1841 and stayed there to summer of 1843. Went to Staten Island, June, 1843,! and returned in December, 1843, or to Thanksgiving. Made pencils in 1844. ; Texas House, to August 29th, 1850. At Walden, (Walden) July, 1845, to fall of 1847, then at (R. W. E.’s) R. W. E.’s to fall of 1848, or while he was in Europe. Yellow House, reformed, till present.

P. M.— Hollowell place and back near Hubbard’s Bridge. To-day and yesterday the boys have been skating on the crust ip the streets, —it is so hard, the snow being very shallow. Considerable ice still clings to the rails and trees and especially weeds, though much attenu- ated. The birches were most bent — bss and are still —in hollows on the north ye [S — sides of hills. Saw some rabbit’s fur - EN on the crust and some (apparently "a bird?) droppings, since the sleet fell,—a few pinches of fur the only trace of the murder. Was it a hawk’s work? Crossed the river on the ice in front of Puffer’s. What do the birds do when the seeds and bark are thus encased in ice?

Down railroad to Andromeda Ponds. I occasionally see a small snowflake in the air against the woods. It is quite cold, and a serious storm seems to be beginning. Just before reaching the Cut I see a shrike flying low beneath the level of the railroad, which rises and alights on the topmost twig of an elm within four or five rods. All ash or bluish-slate above down to middle of wings; dirty-white breast, and a broad black mark through eyes on side of head; pmi- maries (?) black, and some white appears when it flies. Most distinctive its small hooked bill (upper mandible). It makes no sound, but flits to the top of an oak further off. Probably a male. Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open, notwithstanding the cold of the 26th, 27th, and 28th and of to-day. It must be owing to the wind partly. If quite cold, it will probably freeze to-night.’ I find in the andromeda bushes in the Andromeda Ponds a great many nests apparently of the red-wing (?)? suspended after their fashion amid the twigs of the an- dromeda, each now filled with ice. I count twenty-one within fifteen rods of a centre, and have no doubt there are a hundred in that large swamp, for I only looked about the edge part way. It is remarkable that I do not remember to have seen flocks of these birds there. It is an admirable place for them, these swamps are so impassable and the andromeda so dense. It would seem that they steal away to breed here, are not noisy here as along the river.® I never knew, or rather do not remember, the crust so strong [and] hard as it is now and has been for three days. You can skate over it as on ice in any direction. I see the tracks of skaters on all the roads, and they seem hardly to prefer the ice. Above Abiel Wheeler’s, on the back road, the crust is not broken yet, though many sleds and sleighs have passed. The tracks of the skaters are as conspicuous [as] any there. But the snow is but two or three inches deep. Jonas Potter tells me that [he] has known the crust on snow two feet deep to be as strong as this, so that he could drive his sled anywhere over the walls; so that he cut off the trees in Jenny’s lot three feet from the ground, and cut again after the snow was melted. When two men, Billings and Prichard, were divid- ing the stock of my father and Hurd, the former acting for Father, P. was rather tight for Hurd. They came to a cracked bowl, at which P. hesitated and asked, “ Well, what shall we do with this?” B. took it in haste and broke it, and, presenting him one piece, said, “There, that is your half and this is ours.” A good time to walk in swamps, there being ice but no snow to speak of, —all crust. It is a good walk along the edge of the river, the wild side, amid the button-bushes and willows. ‘The eupatorium stalks still stand there, with their brown : hemispheres of little twigs, orreries. The nests of last page are sus- pended very securely between eight or ten andromeda stems, about half- way up them; made of more or less coarse grass or sedge without, then about half an inch of dense and fine, now frozen sphagnum, then fine wild grass or sedge very regularly, and sometimes another layer of sphagnum and of fine grass above these, the whole an inch thick, the bottom com- monly rounded. The outside grasses are well twisted about whatever andromeda stems stand at or near the river. I saw the traces of mice in some of them.

The snow which began last night has con- tinued to fall very silently but steadily, and now it is not far from a foot deep, much the most we have had yet; a dry, light, powdery snow. When I come down I see it in miniature drifts against the panes, alternately streaked dark and light as it is more or less dense. A remarkable, perfectly regular conical peak, a foot high, with concave sides, stands in the fireplace under the sink-room chimney. The pump has a regular conical Persian (?) cap, and every post about the house a similar one. It is quite light, but has not drifted. About 9 a. M. it ceases, and the sun comes out, and shines dazzlingly over the white surface. Every neighbor is shovelling out, and hear the sound of shovels scraping on door-steps. Winter now first fairly commenced, I feel. The places which are slowest to freeze in our river are, first, on account of warmth as well as motion, where a brook comes in, and also probably where are springs in banks and under bridges; then, on account of shal- lowness and rapidity, at bends. I perceive that the cold respects the same places every winter. In the dark, or after a heavy snow, I know well where to cross the river most safely. Where the river is most like a lake, broad with a deep and muddy bottom, there it freezes first and thickest. The open water at a bend seems to be owing to the swiftness of the current, and this to the shallow- ness, and this to the sands taken out of the opposing bank and deposited there. There was yesterday eight or ten acres of open water at the west end of Walden, where is depth and breadth combined. What a horrid shaggy and stiff low wilderness were the Andromeda Ponds yesterday! What then must they have been on the 21st! As it was, it was as if I walked through a forest of glass (with a tough woody core) up to my middle. That dense tufted grass with a greenish tinge was still stiffly coated with ice, as well as everything else, and my shoes were filled with the fragments, but here and there the crim- son sphagnum blushed through the crust beneath. Think of that dense grass, a horrid stiff crop, [Water Milkweed Pods. See page 72] each stem as big as your finger, firm but brittle and about two feet high, and the count- less birds’ nests filled even with ice! PB M. — Across river and over Hill. The wind has been blow- ing and the Snow drifting. {Rose Hips. See page 72]