16 February 1857 – 22 February 1857

8 a. M. — To Lee house site again. It was a rough-cast house when I first knew it. The fire still glowing among the bricks in the cellar. Richard Barrett says he remembers the inscription and the date 1650, but not the rest distinctly. I find that this recess was not in the cellar, but on the west side of the parlor, which was on the same level with the upper cellar at the west end of the house. It was on the back side of a cupboard (in that parlor), which was a few inches deep at the bottom and sloped back to a foot perhaps at top, or on the brick jog three inches at bottom and five and a half at top, and had shelves. The sitting- room of late was on the same level, the west side of this chimney. The old part of the chimney, judging from the clay and the size of the brick, was seven feet wide east and west and about ten north and south. There was the back side of an old oven visible on the south side (late the front of the house) under the stairs (that had been), which had been filled up with the large bricks in clay. The chimney above and behind the oven and this recess had been filled in with great stones, many much bigger than one’s head, packed in clay mixed with the coarsest meadow-hay. Sometimes there were masses of pure clay and hay a foot in diameter. There was a very great proportion of the hay, consisting of cut-grass, three-sided carex, ferns, and still stouter woody stems, apparently a piece of corn-husk one inch wide and several long. And impressions in the clay of various plants, — grasses, ferns, etc., — exactly like those in coal in character. These are perhaps the oldest pressed plants in Concord. I have a mass eight or nine inches in diameter which is apparently one third vegetable. About these stones there is generally only the width (four and one quarter inches) of one brick, so that the chimney was a mere shell. Though the inscription was in a coarse mortar mixed with straw, the sooty bricks over which it was spread were laid in a better mortar, without straw, and yet the mass of the bricks directly above this recess, in the chimney, were all laid in clay. Perhaps they had used plastering there instead of clay because it was a fireplace. A thin coating of whiter and finer mortar or plastering without straw had been spread over the sloping and rounded chimney above the recess and on each side and below it, and this covered many small bricks mingled with the large ones, and though this looked more modern, the straw-mixed mortar of the inscription.overlapped at the top about a foot, proving the coarser mortar the more recent.

Thermometer at 1 Pp. m., 60°. The river is fairly breaking up, and men are out with guns after muskrats, and even boats. Some are appre- hending loss of fruit from this warm weather. It is as open as the 3d of April last year, at least. 5 P. M. — To the old Hunt house. Stik The bricks of the old chimney which has the date on it vary from eight to eight and one half inches in:length, but the oldest in the chimney in the rear part are nine to nine and one fourth long by four and one fourth plus wide and two and one fourth to two and one half thick. This the size also of the bricks in clay behind the boarding of the house. There is straw in the clay and also in the lime used as plastering in both these chim- neys. That on the first has a singular blue color. This house is about forty-nine feet on the front by twenty. The middle of door about twenty-five and a half feet from east end. House from fourteen to fifteen feet high. There was a door at the west end within Abel Hunt’s remembrance; you can see where. The rear part has a wholly oak frame, while the front is pine. But I doubt if it is older, because the boards on the main part are feather-edged even within this part, as if they had once been on the outside. E. Hosmer says that his father said that Dr. Lee told him that he put on the whole upper, 2. e. third, story of the Lee house. Says his old house where Everett lives was dated 1736.

Another remarkably warm and pleasant day. The nights of late nearly as warm as the day. When I step out into the yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.’ The snow is nearly all gone, and it is so warm and springhke that I walk over to the hill, listening for spring birds. The roads are beginning to be settled. I step excited over the moist mossy ground, dotted with the green stars of thistles, crowfoot, etc., the outsides of which are withered. Amid the pitch pines by the hemlocks I am surprised to find a great mildew on the ground, three or four feet long by two and a half wide and one fourth to one inch thick, investing the pine-needles and grass stubble and fallen hemlock twigs, like a thick cobweb or veil, through which the ground, etc., is seen dimly. It has a regular vegetable or lichen-like border, creeping out- ward from a centre, and is more cottony and fibrous there. Like the ground generally thereabouts, it has an inspiring sweet, musty scent when I stoop close to it. I was surprised to find how sweet the whole ground smelled when I lay flat and applied my nose to it; more so than any cow; as it were the promise of the perfect man and new springs to eternity. The mildew apparently occupied the place where a mass of snow ice rested yesterday (it was not yet wholly gone on one side). It was the snow-bank’s footprint, or rather its plantain. One of the first growths of the new year, surely. Further in the pines there was more of it where- ever the snow had but just disappeared, a great many square rods of it all put together. But also there was, very similar to it, yet only a thin veil, the apparent gossamer of spring and fall, close to the edge of the melting snow, and I saw a spider or two. This had only the thickness of a cobweb and was covered with dew, yet was rather hard to distinguish from the mildew. Thin cobwebs were very widely dispersed in the mead- ows where the snow had just melted.’ I thought at one time that I heard a bluebird. Hear a fly buzz amid some willows. Thermometer at 1 Pp. M., 65. Sophia says that Mrs. Brooks’s spireas have started considerably! I hear that geese went over Cambridge last night. I sit all this day and evening without a fire, and some even have windows open. P. M. — To Hubbard’s Bath. The frost out of the ground and the ways settled in many places. I see much more of that gossamer (? ) of the morning, — still regarding the large mildew as different. It abounds in all low grounds where there is a firm pasture sod, where a snow-bank has just melted or on the edge of one that is fast disappearing. I observe some remarkable ones on Hubbard’s land just below the mountain sumachs. They are thin webs over the grass just laid bare close to the snow commonly and over the icy edge of the snow. They are not under the snow. I thought at first it had been formed on the surface of the snow and when it melted rested lightly on the stubble beneath, but I could detect none ex- tending more than three or four inches over the icy edge of the snow, though every stubble half exposed amid the snow even was the source or point d’apput of some. Sometimes, to my surprise, it was an extremely thin, but close-woven (?), perhaps air-tight veil, of the same color but still thinner than the thinnest tissue paper or membrane, in patches one to three feet in diameter, resting lightly on the stubble, which supports it in the form of little tents. This is now dry and very brittle, yet I can get up pieces an inch across. It suggests even a scum on the edge of the melting snow, which has ¢ at last dried and hardened into a web. Here is one which, as commonly, springs from three or four inches within the melted snow, partly resting close and flat upon it, and extends thence several feet from its edge over the stubble. None of these have the thickness of mildew, and for cobwebs I see but two or three spiders about and cannot believe that they can have done all this in one night, nor do they make a close web. It lies lightly upon the stubble and the edge of the snow, as if it had settled in the night from the atmosphere. Can it be a scum formed on the melting snow, caught at last on the stubble like the pap of paper taken up in a sieve? Further off on every side I see the same now fretted away, like a coarse and worn-out sieve, where it was perfect perhaps yesterday. Thus it lasts all day, conspicuous many rods off. I think there must be a square mile of this, at least, in Concord. It is after a very warm, muggy, but fair night, the last snow going off and the thermometer at 50°. Thinnest, frailest, gossamer veils dropped from above on the stubble, as if the fairies had dropped their veils or handkerchiefs after a midnight revel, rejoicing at the melting of the snow. What can it be? Is it animal or vegetable? I suspect it is allied to mould; orisit a scum? or have the spiders anything to do with it? It suggests even a nebulous vegetable matter in the air, which, under these cir- cumstances, in a muggy night, is condensed into this primitive vegetable form. Is it a sort of flowing of the earth, a waste fertility anticipating the more regular growths of spring?

Cloudy and somewhat rainy, the thermome- ter at last fallen to thirty-two and thirty-three degrees. I have often noticed that the surface of the snow was rippled or waved like water. ‘The dust from plowed ground collects on the ridges which bound these waves, and there it becomes very conspicuous as the snow melts, the ridges standing out more and more, for the dirt apparently protects the snow from the sun. Why do water and snow take just this form? Some willow catkins have crept a quarter of an inch from under their scales and look very red, probably on account of the warm weather. A man cannot be said to succeed in this life who does not satisfy one friend. An old man, one of my neighbors, is so demented that he put both legs into one leg of his pantaloons the other morning! Mr. Cheney tells me that Goodwin brought him a partridge to sell in the midst of the late severe weather. C. said it was a pity to kill it, it must find it hard to get a living. “I guess she did n’t find it any harder than I do,”’ answered G. It would be pleasant to recall to smseti the different styles of boats that have been used on this river from the first, beginning with the bark canoe and the dug- out, or log canoe, or pirogue. Then, perhaps, some simple log canoe, or such a boat as now prevails, which probably has its prototype on English rivers, — call it dory, skiff, or what-not, — made as soon as boards were sawed here; the smaller, punt-like ones for one man; the round-bottomed boats from below, and the half-round or lapstreaked, sometimes with sails; the great canal-boats; and the hay-boats of the Sudbury meadows; and lastly what the boys call “shell-boats,”’ introduced last year, in imitation of the Esquimau kayack. At evening it begins to snow, and — (Feb. 20) this morning the ground is once more covered about one inch deep. Minott says that the house he now lives in was framed and set up by Captain Isaac Hoar just beyond the old house by Moore’s, this side the one he was born in, his mother’s (?) house (whose well is that buried by Alcott on the sidewalk), and there the frame stood several years, Hoar having gone off, he thinks, to Westminster. (M. helped a man take down its chimney when he was a boy; it was very old, laid in clay.) He was quite a lad and used to climb up on the frame and, with a teaspoon, take the eggs of the house wren out of the mortise-holes. At last his grandfather, Dr. Abel Prescott, “an eminent physitian,” bought it and moved it to where it now stands, and died in [it] in 1805, aged eighty-eight (born 1717). Said he died exactly where I sat, and the bed stood so and so, north and south from the clock. This Dr. Prescott had once probably lived with his nephew Willoughby Prescott, where Loring’s | is. After, when married, lived in the old rough-cast — house near the poorhouse where Minott’s mother was born. It was Dr. Abel P.’s son Abel (Minott’s uncle) who rode into Concord before the British. Minott’s father was rich, and died early in the army, Aunt says.

The puffball is used by doctors to stop bleed- ing. Has not this property to do with its power of re- pelling moisture? Some have now almost entirely lost their dust, leaving a dry almost woolly substance. Am surprised to see this afternoon a boy collecting red maple sap from some trees behind George Hubbard’s. It runs freely. The earliest sap I made to flow last year was March 14th. It must be owing to the warm weather we have had. The river for some days has been open and its sap visibly flowing, like the maple.

P. M. — To Dugan Desert. The Tommy Wheeler house, like the Hunt house, has the sills projecting inside. Its bricks are about the same size with those of the Lee chimney; they are eight and three quarters to nine inches long by four and a half, but not in clay. A part at least of the back side has bricks on their edges in clay, as at the Hunt house, and there are bricks in clay flat on the plate, close under roof at the eaves. I think that by the size of the bricks you cannot tell the age of an old house within fifty years.