14 January 1856 – 20 January 1856

Sunrise. — Snows again. I think that you can best tell from what side the storm came by ob- serving on which side of the trees the snow is plastered. The crows are flitting about the houses and alight upon the elms. After snowing an inch or two it cleared up at night. Boys, etc., go about straddling the fences, on the crust.

A fine, clear winter day. P. M.— To Hemlocks on the crust, slumping in every now and then. A bright day, not cold. I can comfortably walk without gloves, yet my shadow is a most celestial blue. This only requires a clear bright day and snow-clad earth, not great cold. I cross the river on the crust with some hesitation. ‘The snow appears consider- ably deeper than the 12th, maybe four or five inches deeper, and the river is indicated by a mere depression In it. In the street not only fences but trees are obviously shortened, as by a flood. You are sensible that you are walking at a level a foot or more above the usual one. Seeing the tracks where a leaf had blown along and then tacked and finally doubled and returned on its trail, I thought it must be the tracks of some creature new to me. I find under the hemlocks, in and upon the snow, apparently brought down by the storm, an abundance of those little dead hemlock twigs described on the 13th. They are remarkably slender, and without stiffness like the fir (and I think spruce) twigs, and this gives the hemlock its peculiar grace. These are not yet curved much, and perhaps they got that form from being placed in the nest.

8 a. M. — Down railroad, measuring snow, having had one bright day since the last flake fell; but, as there was a crust which would bear yesterday ® (as to-day), it cannot have settled much. The last storms have been easterly and northeasterly. Why so much (five and one half inches) more now in the woods than on the 12th, as compared with open fields? Was the driving snow caught in a small wood, or did it settle less in the rain there, or since the snow on account of bushes? I hear flying over (and see) a snow bunting, —a clear loud tcheep or tcheop, sometimes rapidly trilled or quavered, — calling its mates. With this snow the fences are scarcely an obstruction to the traveller; he easily steps over them. Often they are buried. I suspect it is two and a half feet deep in Andromeda Swamps now. The snow is much deeper in yards, roads, and all small inclosures than in broad fields.

Henry Shattuck tells me that the quails come almost every day and get some saba beans within two or three rods of his house, — some which he neg- lected to gather. Probably the deep snow drives them to it.

J. B. Moore says that he has caught twenty pounds of pickerel in Walden in one winter, etc., and had had nearly as good luck five or six times the same winter there, not less than ten pounds at one time. Suppose, then, that he has caught fifty pickerel there in one winter, and all others the same winter a hundred and fifty, you have two hundred caught in one winter. | I suspect there are as many as two thousand that will weigh a pound. Five men caught three hundred and thirty-three pounds in a pond in Eastham in one day this winter, say the papers, — largest five and a half pounds. Analyzed a nest which I found January 7th in an upright fork of a red maple sapling on the edge of Hubbard’s Swamp Wood, north side, near river, about eight feet from the ground, the deep grooves made by the twigs on each side. It may be a yellowbird’s. Extreme breadth outside, three inches; inside, one and a half. Extreme height outside, three inches : inside, one and five eighths; sides, three quarters of an inch thick. It is composed of seven principal materials. (I name the most abundant first; I mean most abundant when compressed.) 1. Small compact lengths of silvery pappus about seven eighths of an inch long, perhaps of erechthites, one half inch deep and nearly pure, a very warm bed, chiefly concealed, just beneath the lining inside. 2. Slender catkins, often with the buds and twig ends (of perhaps hazel), throughout the whole bottom and sides, making it thick but open and light, mixed with (3) milkweed silk, 7. e. fibres like flax, but white, being bleached, also in sides and rim, some of it almost threadlike, white with some of the dark epidermis. From the pods? ! 4. Thin and narrow strips of grape-vine bark, chiefly in the rim and sides for three quarters of an inch down, and here and there throughout. 5. Wads of apparently brown fern wool, mixed with the last three. 6. Some finer pale-brown and thinner shreds of bark within the walls and bottom, apparently not grape. If this were added to the grape, these five ma- terials would be not far from equally abundant. 7. Some very fine pale-brown wiry fibres for a lining, just above the pappus and somewhat mixed with it, perhaps for coolness, being springy. Directly beneath the pappus were considerable other shreds of grape and the other bark, short and broken. In the rim and sides some cotton ravellings and some short shreds of fish-line or crow-fence. A red maple leaf within the bottom; a kernel of corn just under the lining of fibres (perhaps dropped by a crow or blackbird or jay or squirrel while the nest was build- ing). A few short lengths of stubble or weed stems in the bottom and sides. A very little brown wool, like, apparently, that in the nest last described, which may be brown fern wool. The milkweed and fern wool conspicuous without the rim and about the twigs. I was most struck by that mass of pure pappus under the inside lining. P. M.— To Walden to learn the temperature of the water. The snow is so deep at present in the streets that it is very difficult turning out, and there are cradle-holes between this and the post-office. The sidewalks being blotted out, the street, like a woodman’s path, looks like a hundred miles up country. I see where children have for some days come to school across the fields on the crust from Abiel Wheeler’s to the railroad cross- ing. I see their tracks in the slight snow upon the crust which fell the 14th. They save a great distance and enjoy the novelty. This is a very mild, melting winter day, but clear and bright, yet I see the blue shadows on the snow at Walden. The snow lies very level there, about ten inches deep, and for the most part bears me as I go across with my hatchet. I think I never saw a more elysian blue than my shadow. I am turned into a tall blue Persian from my cap to my boots, such as no mortal dye can produce, with an amethystine hatchet in my hand. I am in raptures at my own shadow. What if the substance were of as ethereal a nature? Our very shadows are no longer black, but a celestial blue. This has nothing to do with cold, methinks, but the sun must not be too low. I cleared a little space in the snow, which was nine to ten inches deep over the deepest part of the pond, and cut through the ice, which was about seven inches thick, only the first four inches, perhaps, snow ice, the other three clear. The moment I reached the water, it gushed up and overflowed the ice, driving me out this yard in the snow, where it stood at last two and a half inches deep above the ice. The thermometer indicated 334° at top and 349° when drawn up rapidly from thirty feet beneath. So, apparently, it is not much warmer beneath. Goodwin was fishing there. He says he once caught fifty pounds of pickerel here in two days; he thought twenty-five or thirty fishes. Thought that there were many hundred caught here in a winter; that nearly all were females. Observed some of those little hard galls on the high blueberry, pecked or eaten into by some bird (or pos- sibly mouse), for the little white grubs which lie curled up in them. What entomologists the birds are! Most men do not suspect that there are grubs in them, and how secure the latter seem under these thick dry shells! Yet there is no secret but it is confided to some one.

Another bright winter day. P. M.— To river to get some water asclepias to see what birds’ nests are made of. The only open place in the river between Hunt’s Bridge and the railroad bridge is a small space against Merrick’s pasture just below the Rock.! As usual, just below a curve, in shallow water, with the added force of the Assabet. The willow osiers of last year’s growth on the pol- lards in Shattuck’s row, Merrick’s pasture, from four to seven feet long, are perhaps as bright as in the spring, the lower half yellow, the upper red, but they are a little shrivelled in the bark. Measured again the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. The chopper, White, has taken off most of the limbs and just begun, tried his axe, on the foot of the ? Hubbard’s Bridge and, I have no doubt, Lee’s Bridge, as I learned in my walk the next day. tree. He will probably fall it on Monday, or the 21st. At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is fifteen feet and two inches in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, twenty-three feet and nine inches. White is to have ten dollars for taking off the necessary limbs and cutting it down merely, help being found him. He began on Wednesday. Davis and the neighbors were much alarmed by the creaking in the late storms, for fear it would fall on their roofs. It stands two or | three feet into Davis’s yard. As I came home through the village at 8.15 p. M., by a bright moonlight, the moon nearly full and not more than 18° from the zenith, the wind northwest, but not strong, and the air pretty cold, I saw the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds on a larger scale and more distinct than ever before. ‘There were eight or ten courses of clouds, so broad that with equal intervals of blue sky they occupied the whole width of the hea- vens, broad white cirro-stratus in perfectly regular curves from west to east across the whole sky. The four middle ones, occupying the greater part of the visible cope, were particularly distinct. They were all as regularly arranged as the lines on a melon, and with much straighter sides, as if cut with a knife. I hear that it attracted the attention of those who were abroad at the influence of the sun, which set so long ago? or of the rotation of the earth? The bars which I notice so often, morning and evening, are apparently connected with the sun at those periods. In Oliver N. Bacon’s History of Natick, page 235. it is said that, of phenogamous plants, “upwards of 800 species were collected from Natick soil in three years’ time, by a single individual.” I suspect it was Bacon the surveyor. There is given a list of those which are rare in that vicinity. Among them are the fol- lowing which I do not know to grow here: Actea rubra (W.),' Asclepias tuberosa,’ Alopecurus pratensis," Corallorhiza odontorhiza (?) (Nutt.), Drosera filiformis (Nutt.), Ledum latifolium,' Malaxis lilifolia (W.) (what in Gray?), Sagina procumbens.t Among those rare there but common here are Calla Vuirginica, Glecoma hederacea, Iris prismatica, Lycopus Virgin- wus, Mikania scandens, Prunus borealis, Rhodora Canadensis, Xyris aquatica, Zizania aquatica. They, as well as we, have Equisetum hyemale, Kalmia glauca, Tnatris scariosa, Ulmus fulva, Innnea a Pyrola maculata, etc., etc. Bacon quotes White, who quotes Old Colony Me- morial account of manners and customs, etc., of our ancestors. Bacon says that the finest elm in Natick stands in front of Thomas F. Hammond’s house, and was set out “about the year 1760.” “The trunk, five feet from the ground, measures fifteen and a half feet.” G. Emerson gives a different account, q. v. Observed within the material of a robin’s nest, this afternoon, a cherry-stone. Gathered some dry water milkweed stems to com- pare with the materials of the bird’s nest of the 18th. The bird used, I am almost certain, the fibres of the bark of the stem, —not the pods, —just beneath the epi- dermis; only the bird’s is older and more fuzzy and finer, like worn twine or string. The fibres and bark have otherwise the same appearance under the microscope. I stripped off some bark about one sixteenth of an inch wide and six inches long and, separating ten or twelve fibres from the epidermis, rolled it in my fingers, making a thread about the ordinary size. This I could not break by direct pulling, and no man could. I doubt if a thread of flax or hemp of the same size could be made so strong. What an admirable material for the Indian’s fish-line! I can easily get much longer fibres. I hold a piece of the dead weed in my hands, strip off a narrow shred of the bark before my neighbor’s eyes and separate ten or twelve fibres as fine as a hair, roll them in my fingers, and offer him the thread to try its strength. He is surprised and mortified to find that he cannot break it. Probably both the Indian and the bird discovered for themselves this same (so to call it) wild hemp. ‘The corresponding fibres of the mikania seem not so divisible, become not so fine and fuzzy; though somewhat similar, are not nearly so strong. I have a hang-bird’s nest from the riverside, made almost entirely of this, in narrow shreds or strips with the epidermis on, wound round and round the twigs and woven into a basket. That is, this bird has used perhaps the strongest fibre which the fields afforded and which most civilized men have not de- tected. Knocked down the bottom of that summer yellow- bird’s nest made on the oak at the Island last sum- mer. It is chiefly of fern wool and also, apparently, some sheep’s wool (?), with a fine green moss (ap- parently that which grows on button-bushes) inmixed, and some milkweed fibre, and all very firmly agglu- tinated together. Some shreds of grape-vine bark about it. Do not know what portion of the whole nest it is.

In my experience I have found nothing so truly impoverishing as what is called wealth, 7. ¢. the command of greater means than you had before pos- sessed, though comparatively few and slight still, for you thus inevitably acquire a more expensive habit of living, and even the very same necessaries and comforts cost you more than they once did. Instead of gaining, you have lost some independence, and if your income should be suddenly lessened, you would find yourself poor, though possessed of the same means which once made you rich. Within the last five years I have had the command of a little more money than in the pre- vious five years, for I have sold some books and some lectures; yet I have not been a whit better fed or clothed or warmed or sheltered, not a whit richer, ex- cept that I have been less concerned about my living, but perhaps my life has been the less serious for it, and, to balance it, I feel now that there is a possibility of failure. Who knows but I may come upon the town, if, as is likely, the public want no more of my books, or lectures (which last is already the case)? Before, I was much likelier to take the town upon my shoulders. That is, I have lost some of my independence on them, when they would say that I had gained an indepen- dence. If you wish to give a man a sense of poverty, give him a thousand dollars. The next hundred dollars he gets will not be worth more than ten that he used to get. Have pity on him; withhold your gifts. P. M. — Up river to Hollowell place. I see the blue between the cakes of snow cast out in making a path, in the triangular recesses, though it is pretty cold, but the sky is completely overcast. It is now good walking on the river, for, though there has been no thaw since the snow came, a great part of it has been converted into snow ice by sinking the old ice beneath the water, and the crust of the rest is stronger than in the fields, because the snow is so shallow and has been so moist. The river is thus an advantage as a highway, not only in summer and when the ice is bare in the winter, but even when the snow lies very deep in the fields. It is invaluable to the walker, being now not only the most interesting, but, except- ing the narrow and unpleasant track in the highways, the only practicable route. The snow never lies so deep over it as elsewhere, and, if deep, it sinks the ice and is soon converted into snow ice to a great extent, beside being blown out of the river valley. Neither is it drifted here. Here, where you cannot walk at all in the summer, is better walking than elsewhere in the winter. But what a different aspect the river’s brim now from what it wears in summer! I do not this mo- ment hear an insect hum, nor see a bird, nor a flower. That museum of animal and vegetable life, a meadow, is now reduced to a uniform level of white snow, with only half a dozen kinds of shrubs and weeds rising here and there above it. Nut Meadow Brook is open in the river meadow, but not into the river. It is remarkable that the short strip in the middle below the Island (vide yesterday) should be the only open place between Hunt’s Bridge and Hubbard’s, at least, — probably as far as Lee’s. The river has been frozen solidly ever since the 7th, and that small open strip of yesterday (about one rod wide and in middle) was probably not more than a day or two old. It is very rarely closed, I suspect, in all places more than two weeks at a time. Ere long it wears its way up to the light, and its blue artery again appears here and there. In one place close to the river, where the forget-me-not grows, that springy place under the bank just above the railroad bridge, the snow is quite melted and the bare ground and flattened weeds exposed for four or five feet. Broke open a frozen nest of mud and stubble in a black willow, probably a robin’s, in which were a snail (?) shell and a skunk-cabbage seed (?). Were they ©) not left there by a mouse? Or could they have been taken up with the mud? (They were somewhat in the mud. A downy woodpecker without red on head the only bird seen in this walk [ ?]. I stand within twelve feet. The arrangement of the clouds last night attracted attention in various parts of the town. A probable kingbird’s nest, on a small horizontal branch of a young swamp white oak, amid the twigs, about ten feet from ground. This tree is very scraggy; has numerous short twigs at various angles with the branches, making it unpleasant to climb and affording support to birds’ nests. The nest is round, running to rather a sharp point on one side beneath. Extreme diameter outside, four and a half to five inches; within, three inches; depth within, two inches; without, four or more. The principal materials are ten, in the order of their abundance thus: — 1. Reddish and gray twigs, some a foot and more in length, which are cranberry vines, with now and then a leaf on, probably such as were torn up by the rakers. Some are as big round as a knitting-needle, and would be taken for a larger bush. These make the stiff mass of the outside above and rim. 2. Woody roots, rather coarser, intermixed from waterside shrubs. Probably some are from cranberry vines. These are mixed with the last and with the bot- tom. 8. Softer and rather smaller roots and root-fibres of herbaceous plants, mixed with the last and a little fur- ther inward, for the harshest are always most exter- nal. 4. (Still to confine myself to the order of abundance) withered flowers and short bits of the gray downy stems of the fragrant everlasting; these more or less com- pacted and apparently agglutinated from the mass of the solid bottom, and more loose, with the stems run down to a point on one side the bottom. 5. What I think is the fibrous growth of a willow, moss-like with a wiry dark-colored hair-like stem (pos- lining, and lies contiguous in the sides and bottom. 6. What looks like brown decayed leaves and con- fervee from the dried bottom of the riverside, mixed with the everlasting-tops internally in the solid bot- tom. — 7. Some finer brown root-fibres, chiefly between the lining of No. 6 and hair and the coarser fibres of No. 3. 8. A dozen whitish cocoons, mixed with the ever- lasting-tops and dangling about the bottom peak ex- ternally; a few within the solid bottom. Also eight or ten very minute cocoons mixed with these, attached in a cluster to the top of an everlasting. — 9. A few black much branched roots (?) (perhaps some utricularia from the dried bottom of river), mixed with Nos. 2 and 3. 10. Some horsehair, white and black, together with No. 5 forming the lining.