1 January 1856 – 6 January 1856

Probably the coldest morning yet, our ther- mometer 6° below zero at 8 a. M.; yet there was quite a mist in the air.? The neighbors say it was 10° below zero at 7 A. M. P. M. — To Walden.

Snows again. About two inches have fallen in the night, but it turns to a fine mist. It was a damp snow. P. M. — To Hill. The snow turned to a fine mist or mizzling, through which I see a little blue in the snow, lurking in the ruts. In the river meadows and on the (perhaps moist) sides of the hill, how common and conspicuous the brown spear-heads of the hardhack, above the snow, and looking black by contrast with it! Just beyond the Assabet Spring I see where a squirrel, © gray or red, dug through the snow last night in search of acorns. I know it was last night, for it was while the last snow was falling, and the tracks are partly filled by it; they are like this: » os @w This squirrel has burrowed to the ® - “ ground in many places within a few yards, probing the leaves for acorns in various directions, making a short burrow under the snow, sometimes passing under the snow a yard and coming out at another place; for, though it is somewhat hardened on the surface by the nightly freezing and the hail, it is still quite soft and light beneath next the earth, and a squirrel or mouse can burrow very fast indeed there. I am surprised to find how easily I can pass my hand through it there. In many places it has dropped the leaves, etc., about the mouth of the hole. (The whole snow about ten inches deep.) I see where it sat in a young oak and ate an acorn, drop- ping the shells on the snow beneath, for there is no track to the shells, but only to the base of the oak. How independently they live, not alarmed, though the snow be two feet deep! Now, when all the fields and meadows are covered deep with snow, the warm-colored shoots of osiers, red and yellow, rising above it, remind me of flames. 7 It is astonishing how far a merely well-dressed and good-looking man may go without being challenged by any sentinel. What is called good society will bid high for such. The man whom the State has raised to high office, like that of governor, for instance, from some, it may be, honest but less respected calling, cannot return to his former humble but profitable pursuits, his old cus- tomers will be so shy of him. His ex-honorableness- ship stands seriously in his way, whether he is a lawyer or a shopkeeper. He can’t get ex-honorated. So he becomes a sort of State pauper, an object of charity on its hands, which the State is bound in honor to see through and provide still with offices of similar re- spectability, that he may not come to want. A man who has been President becomes the Ex-President, and can’t travel or stay at home anywhere but men will persist in paying respect to his ex-ship. It is cruel to remember his deeds so long. When his time is out, why can’t they let the poor fellow go?

One of the coldest mornings. Thermometer — 9°, say some. P. M. — Up river to Hubbard’s Bridge. It has been trying to snow all day, but has not suc- ceeded; as if it were too cold. Though it has been falling all day, there has not been enough to whiten the coat of the traveller. I come to the river, for here it is the best walking. The snow is not so deep over the ice. Near the middle, the superincumbent snow has so far been converted into a coarse snow ice that it will bear me, though occasionally I slump through intervening water to another ice below. Also, perhaps, the snow has been somewhat blown out of the river valley. At any rate, by walking where the ice was frozen last, or over the channel, I can get along quite com- fortably, while it is hard travelling through this crusted snow in the fields. Generally, to be sure, the river is but a white snow-field, indistinguishable from the fields, but over the channel there is a thread, com- monly, of yellowish porous-looking snow ice. The hardhack above the snow has this form: Should not that meadow where the first bridge was built be called Hardhack Meadow? Also there are countless small ferns, with terminal leafet only left on, still rising above the snow, —for I notice the herbage of the riverside now, — thus, like the large ones in swamps: What with the Pd grasses —that coarse, now straw - colored grass —and the stems of the button-bushes, the snow about the button-bushes forms often broad, — several rods broad, —low mounds, nearly burying the bushes, along which the tops of the button-bushes and that yeh broad-bladed, now straw- colored grass still rise, with masses of thin, now black-looking balls, erect or ee, dangling. The black willows have here and there still a very few little curled and crispy leaves. The river is last open, methinks, just below a bend,* as now at the Bath Place and at Clamshell Hill; and quite a novel sight is the dark water there. How little locomotive now look the boats whose painted sterns IT just detect where they are half filled with ice and almost completely buried in snow, so neglected by their improvident owners, — some frozen in the ice, opening their seams, some drawn up on the bank. This is not merely improvidence; it is ingratitude. Now and then I hear a sort of creaking twitter, maybe from a passing snow bunting. This is the weather for them. I am surprised that Nut Meadow Brook has overflowed its meadow and converted it into that coarse yellowish snow ice. Otherwise it had been a broad snow-field, concealing a little ice under it. There is a narrow thread of open water over its channel. The thin snow now driving from the north and lodging on my coat consists of those beautiful star crystals, not cottony and chubby spokes, as on the 13th December, but thin and partly transparent crystals. They are about a tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes without a tire, or rather with six perfect little leafets, fern-like, with a distinct straight and slender midrib, raying from the centre. On each side of each midrib there is a transparent thin blade with a crenate edge, thus: How full of the creative genius is the air in which Ae these are gener- ated! I should hardly admire more if real stars fell and lodged on my coat. Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. Nothing is cheap and coarse, neither dewdrops nor snowflakes. Soon the storm increases, — it was al- ready very severe to face, —and the snow comes finer, more white and powdery. Who knows but this is the original form of all snowflakes, but that when I observe these crystal stars falling around me they are but just generated in the low mist next the earth? I am nearer to the source of the snow, its primal, auroral, and golden hour or infancy, but commonly the flakes reach us travel-worn and agglomerated, comparatively without order or beauty, far down in their fall, like men in their advanced age. As for the circumstances under which this phenom- enon occurs, it is quite cold, and the driving storm is bitter to face,’ though very little snow is falling. It comes almost horizontally from the north. Methinks this kind of snow never falls in any quantity.’ A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of the storm- chariots. ‘The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six. Order, xdécpos.$ On the Saskatchewan, when no man of science is there to behold, still down they come, and not the less fulfill their destiny, perchance melt at once on the Indian’s face. What a world we live in! where myr- iads of these little disks, so beautiful to the most pry- ing eye, are whirled down on every traveller's coat, the observant and the unobservant, and on the restless squirrel’s fur, and on the far-stretching fields and for- ests, the wooded dells, and the mountain-tops. Far, far away from the haunts of man, they roll down some little slope, fall over and come to their bearings, and melt or lose their beauty in the mass, ready anon to swell some little rill with their contribution, and so, at last, the universal ocean from which they came. There they lie, like the wreck of chariot-wheels after a battle in the skies. Meanwhile the meadow mouse shoves them aside in his gallery, the schoolboy casts them in his snowball, or the woodman’s sled glides smoothly over them, these glorious spangles, the sweep- ing of heaven’s floor. And they all sing, melting as they sing of the mysteries of the number six, —six, six, six. He takes up the water of the sea in his hand, leaving the salt; He disperses it in mist through the skies; He recollects and sprinkles it like grain in six- rayed snowy stars over tie earth, there to lie till He dis- solves its bonds again." Found on a young red sonia near the water, in Hubbard’s riverside grove, a nest, perhaps a size bigger than a summer yellowbird’s, chiefly of Ne, bark shreds, bound and lined with lint and a little of something like dried hickory blossoms.’ \ A little feather, yellow at the extremity, attached to the outside. It was on a slanting twig or small branch about eighteen feet high, and I shook it down. The rim of fine shreds of grape-vine bark chiefly, the outer edge being covered with considerable of the droppings of the young birds. I thought it the same kind with that found December 30th wit. Can it be a red- start, or is [it] one of the vireos possibly? or a gold- finch? which would account for the yellow-tipped feather. In the blueberry swamp near by, which was cut down by the ice, another, perhaps a little smaller, of very similar materials but more of the hickory (??) blossoms on the outside beneath, but this was in a nearly upright fork of a red maple about seven feet high. The little nest of June 26th, 1855, looks like the inside of one of these. Upon these two nests found to-day and on that of the 30th December, I find the same sort of dried catkin (apparently not hickory) connected with a little sort of brown bud, maybe birch or alder. This makes me suspect they may be all one kind, though the last was in an upright fork and had no droppings on it.

High wind and howling and driving snow- storm all night, now much drifted. There is a great drift in the front entry and at the crack of every door and on the window-sills. Great drifts on the south of walls. Clears up at noon, when no vehicle had passed the house. Frank Morton has brought home, and I opened, that pickerel of the 4th. It is frozen solid. Yellow spawn as big as a pin-head, with smaller between, en- wraps its insides the whole length, half an inch thick. It must spawn very early then. I find in its gullet, or paunch, or maw (the long white bag), three young perch, one of them six inches long, and the tail of a fourth. Its belly was considerably puffed out. ‘Two of the perch lay parallel, side by side, of course head downward, in its gullet (?). The upper and largest perch was so high that he was cut in two in the middle in cutting off the head. And yet it was caught in endeavor- ing to swallow another large minnow! This is what you may call voracity. P. M. — To Drifting Cut. The snow is now probably more than a foot deep on a level. While I am making a path to the pump, I hear hurried rippling notes of birds, look up, and see quite a flock of snow buntings coming to alight amid the currant-tops in the yard. It is a sound almost as if made with their wings. What a pity our yard was made so tidy in the fall with rake and fire, and we have now no tall crop of weeds rising above this snow to invite these birds!