25 February 1856 – 2 March 1856

P. M.— To Walden and Fair Haven. The only bare ground is the railroad track, where the snow was thin. The crust still bears, and [I] left the railroad at Andromeda Ponds and went through on crust to Fair Haven. Was surprised to see some little minnows only an inch long in an open place in Well Meadow Brook. As I stood there, saw that they had just felled my bee tree, the hemlock. The chopper even then stood at its foot. I went over and saw him cut into the cavity by my direction. He broke a piece out of his axe as big as my nail against a hemlock knot in the meanwhile. ‘There was no comb within. ‘They have just been cutting wood at Bittern Cliff. The sweet syrup is out on the ends of the hickory logs there. Gathered some facts from Henry Bond’s “Geneal- ogies of the Families of Watertown, etc.” My mother’s mother was Mary Jones, only daughter of “Col. Elisha Jones, Esq., of Weston. A Boston. newspaper, of Feb. 15, 1775, says ‘On Monday last, died, in this town, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, Elisha Jones Esq., late of Weston, for many years a magistrate, Col. of a Regiment of Militia, and member of the General Assembly. In the many departments in which he acted, he eminently showed the man of principle, virtue,’ &c. He married, Jan. 24, 1733-4, Mary Allen, and occupied his father’s homestead.” (Mary Allen was the daughter of Abel Allen, who was the son of Lewis Allen of Watertown Farms, who died 1707-8.) | The children of E. Jones and Mary Allen were (1) Nathan (2d son died in infancy), (8) Elisha, (4) Israel, (5) Daniel, (6) Elias, (7) Josiah, (8) Silas, (9) Mary (b. 1748), (10) Ephraim, (11) Simon (or Simeon), (12) Stephen, (13) Jonas, (14) Phillemore, (15) Charles.

P. M. — To Hubbard’s Close. I see at bottom of the mill brook, below Emerson’s, two dead frogs. The brook has part way yet a snowy bridge over it. Were they left by a mink, or killed by cold and ice? In Hubbard’s maple swamp beyond, I see the snow under a dead maple, where a woodpecker has drilled a handsome round hole. Excepting the carrying it downward within, it is ready for a nest. May they not have a view to this use even now?

Wednesday. P. M. — Up Assabet. Am surprised to see how the ice lasts on the river. It but just begins to be open for a foot or two at Mer- rick’s, and you see the motion of the stream. It has overflowed the ice for many rods a few feet in width. It has been tight even there (and of course everywhere else on the main stream, and on North Branch except at Loring’s Brook and under stone bridge) since Jan- uary 25th, and elsewhere on the main stream since January 7th, as it still is. That is, we may say that the river has been frozen solidly for seven weeks. On the 25th I saw a load of wood drawn by four horses up the middle of the river above Fair Haven Pond. On that day, the 25th, they were cutting the last of Baker’s wood-lot on the south side of Fair Haven. They cut the greater part of it last winter, and this was the wood they were hauling off. I see many birch scales, freshly blown over the snow. They are falling all winter. What is that narrow, twisted, yellowish-brown scale which is seen on the snow all winter near woods? Shaped like this:1 — =a —— Found, in the snow in E. Hosmer’s meadow, a gray rabbit’s hind leg, freshly left there, perhaps by a fox. The papers are talking about the prospect of a war between England and America. Neither side sees how its country can avoid a long and fratricidal war without sacrificing its honor. Both nations are ready to take a desperate step, to forget the interests of civilization and Christianity and their commercial pros- perity and fly at each other’s throats. When I see an individual thus beside himself, thus desperate, ready to shoot or be shot, like a blackleg who has little to lose, no serene aims to accomplish, I think he is a candidate for bedlam. What asylum is there for nations to go to? Nations are thus ready to talk of wars and challenge one another,’ because they are made up to such an extent of poor, low-spirited, despairing men, in whose eyes the chance of shooting somebody else without being shot themselves exceeds their actual good fortune. Who, in fact, will be the first to enlist but the most desperate class, they who have lost all hope? And they may at last infect the rest. Minott says that partridges will bud on black birches as on apple trees.

P. M.— To Nut Meadow. Mother says that the cat lay on her bread one night and caused it to rise finely all around her. T go on the crust which we have had since the 13th, 1. e. on the solid frozen snow, which settles very gradu- ally in the sun, across the fields and brooks. The very beginning of the river’s breaking up appears to be the oozing of water through cracks in the thinnest places, and standing in shallow puddles there on the ice, which freeze solid at night. The river and brooks are quite shrunken. The brooks flow far under the hollow ice and snow-crust a foot thick, which here and there has fallen in, showing the shrunken stream- far below. The surface of the snow melts into a regular waved form, like raised scales. Miles is repairing the damage done at his new mill by the dam giving way. He is shovelling out the flume, which was half filled with sand, standing in the water. His sawmill, built of slabs, reminds me of a new country. He has lost a head of water equal to two feet by this accident. Yet he sets his mill agoing to show me how it works. What a smell as of gun-wash when he raised the gate! He calls it the sulphur from the pond. It must be the carburetted hydrogen gas from the bottom of the pond under the ice. It powerfully scents the whole mill. A powerful smelling-bottle. How pleasant are the surroundings of a mill! Here are the logs (pail- stuff), already drawn to the door from a neighboring hill before the mill is in operation. The dammed-up meadow, the meadow [sic], the melted snow, and welling springs are the serf he compels to do his work. He is unruly as yet, has lately broken loose, filled up the flume, and flooded the fields below. He uses the dam of an old mill which stood here a hundred years ago, which now nobody knows anything about. The mill is built of slabs, of the worm-eaten sap-wood. The old dam had probably been undermined by muskrats. It would have been most prudent to have built a new one. Rude forces, rude men, and rude appliances. Martial Miles, who is there, says that there are many trout in this brook. He sees them running down just before winter, and at that time Charles Snow once speared a great many, one weighing four pounds. He once came within four feet of an otter at 10 P. m., in the middle of the road, by the guide-board just north of this brook. Spoke of the one shot in a ditch at Donge Hole, as I had heard before; also of the three killed (shot) at Farrar’s Swamp. The one who shot them told him that he attempted to kill them with a shovel, but that they would take it out of his hands as often as he attempted it. Coombs came along with his dog and gun, on his way to shoot partridges, which will come out to bud this evening on certain young apple trees. He has got four or five for several nights in succession, and sees foxes there, running about on the crust. Francis Wheeler says he sold two young fox-skins to a tin ped- dler to-day for a dollar. Coombs says they got a silver- gray fox in Lincoln this winter, and sold its skin for sixteen dollars! He says that he killed a sheldrake a month or six weeks ago in a small open place beneath the falls at the factory. This shows what hardy birds they are. Last summer he found a black duck’s nest on one of the islands in Loring’s Pond. He saw the duck hide in the grass, came up, and put his hand on a parcel of feathers and, raising a handful, was sur- prised to find the eggs under them. How various are the talents of men! From the brook in which one lover of nature has never during all his lifetime detected anything larger than a minnow, an- other extracts a trout that weighs three pounds, or an otter four feet long. How much more game he will see who carries a gun, 2. e. who goes to see it! Though you roam the woods all your days, you never will see by chance what he sees who goes on purpose to see it. One gets his living by shooting woodcocks; most never see one in their lives. Coombs goes to shoot partridges this evening by a . far-off wood-side, and M. Miles goes home to load up, for he is going to Boston with a load of wood to-night. Our young maltese cat Min, which has been absent five cold nights, the ground covered deep with crusted snow, — her first absence, —and given up for dead, has at length returned at daylight, awakening the whole house with her mewing and afraid of the strange girl we have got in the meanwhile. She is a mere wrack of skin and bones, with a sharp nose and wiry tail. She is as one returned from the dead. ‘There is as much rejoicing as at the return of the prodigal son, and if ” we had a fatted calf we should kill it. Various are the conjectures as to her adventures, — whether she has had a fit, been shut up somewhere, or lost, torn in pieces by a certain terrier or frozen to death. In the meanwhile she is fed with the best that the house affords, minced meats and saucers of warmed milk, and, with the aid of unstinted sleep in all laps in succession, is fast picking up her crumbs. She has already found her old place under the stove, and is preparing to make a stew of her brains there. That strong gun-wash scent from the mill-pond water was very encouraging. I who never partake of the sacrament make the more of it. How simple the machinery of the mill! Mules has dammed a stream, raised a pond or head of water, and placed an old horizontal mill-wheel in position to re- celve a jet of water on its buckets, transferred the motion to a horizontal shaft and saw by a few cog- wheels and simple gearing, and, throwing a roof of slabs over all, at the outlet of the pond, you have a mill. Returning on the crust, over Puffer’s place, I saw a fine, plump hen hanging from an apple tree and a crow from another, probably poisoned to kill foxes with, —a hen which probably a fox had killed. Stopped at Martial Miles’s to taste his cider. Mar- vellously sweet and spirited without being bottled; alum and mustard put into the barrels. A weight of water stored up in a meadow, applied to move a saw, which scratches its way through the trees placed before it. So simple is a sawmill. . A millwright comes and builds a dam across the foot of the meadow, and a mill-pond is created, in which, at length, fishes of various kinds are found; and musk- rats and minks and otter frequent it. The pond is like a weight wound up.

Minott told me this afternoon of his catch- ing a pickerel in the Mill Brook once, —before the pond was drawn off, when the brook had four or five times as much water as now, — which weighed four pounds. Says they stayed in it all winter in thosedays. This was near his land up the brook. He once also caught there, when fishing for pickerel, a trout which weighed three and a half pounds. He fell within two feet of the water, but [he] succeeded in tossing him higher up. When cutting peat thereabouts, he saw a stinkpot turtle in the water eating a frog which it had just caught. Speaks of seeing a mink swimming along a little [sic] in his beech wood-lot, and from time to time running along the shore; part way up an alder and down again. He loves to recall his hunting days and adventures, and I willingly listen to the stories he has told me half a dozen times already. One day he saw about twenty black ducks on Goose Pond, and stole down on them, thinking to get a shot, but it chanced that a stray dog scared them up before he was ready. He stood on the point of the neck of land between the ponds, and watched them as they flew high toward Flint’s Pond. As he looked, he saw one separate from the flock when they had got half-way to Flint’s Pond, or half a mile, and return straight toward Goose Pond again. He thought he would await him, and give him a shot if he came near enough. As he flew pretty near and rather low, he fired, whereupon the duck rose right up high into the air, and he saw by his motions that he was wounded. Suddenly he dropped, by a slanting fall, into the point of a thick pine wood, and he heard him plainly strike the ground like a stone. He went there and searched for a long time, and was about giving it up, when at length he saw the duck standing, still alive and bleed- ing, by the side of a stump, and made out to kill him with a stick before he could reach the water. He said he saw Emerson come home from lecturing the other day with his knitting-bag (lecture-bag) in his hand. He asked him if the lecturing business was as good as it used to be. . Emerson said he did n’t see but it was as good as ever; guessed the people would want lectures “as long as he or I lived.” Told again of the partridge hawk striking down a partridge which rose before him and flew across the run in the beech woods, — how suddenly he did it, — and he, hearing the fluttering of the partridge, came up and secured it, while the hawk kept out of gun- shot.

9 a. M.— To Flint’s Pond via Walden, by railroad and the crust. | I hear the hens cackle as not before for many months. Are they not now beginning to lay? The catkins of the willow by the causeway and of the aspens appear to have pushed out a little further than a month ago. I see the down of half a dozen on that willow by the causeway; on the aspens pretty generally. As I go through the cut it is still, warm, and more or less sunny, springlike (about 40°+ ), and the sand and red- dish subsoil is bare for about a rod in width on the railroad. I hear several times the fine-drawn phe-be note of the chickadee, which I heard only once during the winter. Singular that I should hear this on the first spring day. I see a pitch pine seed with its wing, far out on Walden. Going down the hill to Goose Pond, I slump now and then. Those dense, dry beds of leaves are gathered especially about the leafy tops of young oaks, which are bent over and held down by the snow. They lie up particularly light and crisp. The birch stubs stand around Goose Pond, killed by the water a year or two ago, five or six feet high and thickly, as if they were an irregular stake fence a rod out. Going up the hill again, I slump in up to my middle. At Flint’s I find half a dozen fishing. The pond cracks a very little while I am there, say at half past ten. I think I never saw the ice so thick. It measures just two feet thick in shallow water, twenty rods from shore. Goodwin says that somewhere where he lived they called cherry-birds “ port-royals.”’ Haynes of Sudbury brought some axe-helves which he had been making to Smith’s shop to sell to-day. Those made by hand are considered stronger than those which are turned, because their outline conforms to the grain. They told him they had not sold any of the last yet. “Well,” said he, “you may depend on it you will. They ’ve got to come after them yet, for they have n’t been able to get into the woods this winter on account of the snow, and they ‘ll have to do all their chopping this month.” I like to see the farmer whittling his own axe-helve, as I did E. Hosmer a white oak one on the 27th ult. It is remarkable, that though I have not been able to find any open place in the river almost all winter, except under the further stone bridge and at Loring’s Brook, — this winter so remarkable for ice and snow, — Coombs should (as he says) have killed two shel- drakes at the falls by the factory, a place which I had forgotten, some four or six weeks ago. Singular that this hardy bird should have found this small opening, which I had forgotten, while the ice everywhere else was from one to two feet thick, and the snow sixteen inches on a level. If there is a crack amid the rocks of some waterfall, this bright diver is sure to know it. Ask the sheldrake whether the rivers are completely sealed up.

Has snowed three or four inches — very damp snow — in the night; stops about 9 a. m. This will probably help carry off the old snow, so solid and deep. P. M. — Walking up the river by Prichard’s, was surprised to see, on the snow over the river, a great many seeds and scales of birches, though the snow had so recently fallen, there had been but little wind, and it was already spring. There was one seed or scale to a square foot, yet the nearest birches were, about fifteen of them, along the wall thirty rods east. As I advanced toward them, the seeds became thicker and thicker, till they quite discolored the snow half a dozen rods distant, while east of the birches there was not one. The birches appear not to have lost a quarter of their seeds yet. As I went home up the river, I saw some of the seeds forty rods off, and perhaps, in a more favorable direction, I might have found them much further. It suggested how unwearied Nature is, spreading her seeds. Even the spring does not find her unprovided with birch, aye, and alder and pine seed. A great proportion of the seed that was carried to a distance lodged in the hollow over the river, and when the river breaks up will be carried far away, to distant shores and meadows. The opening in the river at Merrick’s is now in- creased to ten feet in width in some places. I can hardly believe that hen-hawks may be begin- ning to build their nests now, yet their young were a fortnight old the last of April last year.