9 March 1857 – 15 March 1857

I see and talk with Rice, sawing off the ends of clapboards which he has planed, to make them square, for an addition to his house. He has got a fire in his shop, and plays at house-building there. His life is poetic. He does the work himself. He combines several qualities and talents rarely combined. Though he owns houses in the city, whose repair he attends to, finds tenants for them, and collects the rent, he also has his Sudbury farm and bean-fields. Though he lived in a city, he would still be natural and related to primi- tive nature around him. Though he owned all Beacon Street, you might find that his mittens were made of the skin of a woodchuck that had ravaged his bean-field, which he had cured. I noticed a woodchuck’s skin tacked up to the inside of his shop. He said it had fatted on his beans, and William had killed [it] and expected to get another to make a pair of mittens of, one not being quite large enough. It was excellent for mittens. You could hardly wear it out. Spoke of the cuckoo, which was afraid of the birds, was easily beaten; would dive right into the middle of a poplar, then come out on to some bare twig and look round for a nest to rob of young or eggs. Had noticed a pigeon woodpecker go repeatedly in a straight line from his nest in an apple tree to a distant brook-side in a meadow, dive down there, and in a few minutes return.

Thermometer this morning, about 7 a. M., 2°, and the same yesterday. This month has been windy and cold, a succession of snows one or two inches deep, soon going off, the spring birds all driven off. It is in strong contrast with the last month. Captain E. P. Dorr of Buffalo tells me that there is a rise and fall daily of the lakes about two or three inches, not accounted for. A difference between the lakes and sea is that when there is no wind the former are quite smooth, no swell. Otherwise he thought that no one could tell whether he was on the lakes or the ocean. Described the diver’s descending one hundred and sixty-eight feet to a sunken steamer and getting up the safe after.she had been sunk three years. De- scribed the breeding of the capelin at Labrador, a small fish about as big as a sardine. They crowd along the shore in such numbers that he had seen a cartload crowded quite on to the shore high and dry by those in the rear. | Elliot, the botanist, says (page 184) that the Lechea villosa (major of Michaux), “if kept from running to seed, would probably form a very neat edging for the beds of a flower garden; the foliage of the radical branches is very handsome during the winter, and the size of the plant is well suited to such a purpose.” Rhus Toxicodendron (page 363): “'The juice which exudes on plucking the leaf-stalks from the stem of the R. radicans is a good indelible dye for marking linen or cotton.”’ Of the Drosera rotundifolia (page 375), “This fluid never appears to fall from the hairs, but is secreted nearly in proportion to its evaporation, and the secre- tion is supposed to be greatest in dry clear weather; ” hence called sundew. Howitt, in his “ Boy’s Adventures in Australia,” says, “People here thought they had discovered large numbers of the graves of the blacks, lying lengthways, as amongst the whites, but these have turned out to be a natural phenomenon, and called Dead Men’s Graves.” ‘The natives generally bury — when they do not burn —in a sitting posture. Is the country cold enough to allow these mounds to have been made by the ice?

A warmer day at last. It has been steadily cold and windy, with repeated light snows, since Feb- ruary 26th came in. This afternoon is comparatively warm, and the few signs of spring are more reliable. I go down the bank of the river in the Great Meadows. Many of those small, slender insects, with long, nar- row wings (some apparently of same species without), are crawling about in the sun on the snow and bark of trees, etc. The maples, apple trees, etc., have been barked by the ice, and show light-colored bands one or two feet from the ground about their trunks. I find on examination that in these cases the bark has not been worn off by the floating ice rubbing against them, as happens when they are directly on the edge of the stream, for this light and barked surface occurs often when the trunk is surrounded by a hedge of sprouts or of other twigs only six inches distant, which show no marks of attrition; and the inner or true bark of the tree is not injured, only the thick epi- dermis or scaly outer bark has been detached, though that may have been very firmly attached to the trunk. The ice has evidently frozen to this, and when the water fell, has taken it off with itself; but the smaller twigs appear to have been [sic] and recovered again. Tough ' outer scales, which you could not possibly detach nor be- gin to detach with your hands, will be taken off quite clean, leaving exposed the yellowish surface of the inner bark. I see that some white maple buds apparently opened a little in that warm spell before the 26th of February, for such have now a minute orifice at the apex, through which you can even see the anthers.

P. M.— To Hubbard’s Close and Walden. I see in the ditches in Hubbard’s Close the fine green tips of spires of grass just rising above the surface of the water in one place, as 1f unwilling to trust itself to the frosty air. Favored by the warmth of the water and sheltered by the banks of the ditch, it has advanced thus far. But generally I see only the flaccid and floating frost-bitten tops of grass which apparently started that warm spell in February. The surface of the ditches is spotted with these pale and withered frost-bitten blade- lets. It was the first green blush, as it were, — nay, it is purple or lake often, and a true blush, — of spring, of that Indian spring we had in February. An early dawn and premature blush of spring, at which I was not present. ‘T’o be present at the instant when the spring- ing grass at the bottoms of ditches lifts its spear above the surface and bathes in the spring air! Many a first faint crop mantling the pools thus early is mown down by the frost before the village suspects that vegetation has reawakened. g The trout darts away in the puny brook there so swiftly in a zigzag course that commonly I only see the ripple that he makes, in proportion, in this brook only a foot wide, like that made by a steamer in a canal. Or if I catch a glimpse of him before he buries himself in the mud, it is only a dark film without distinct outline. By his zigzag course he bewilders the eye, and avoids capture perhaps. As usual at this date and earlier, there are a few square rods of green grass tufts at Brister’s springs, like a green fire under the pines and alders, and in one place an apparent growth of golden saxifrage. At Heywood’s Peak, I start partridges from the perfectly bare hillside. Such the spots they frequent at this season. I cross one of the bays of Walden, and might the middle. By Thrush Alley, where they have been cutting more wood this winter, I see one of those beetles made of an oak excrescence, such as I have heard of, left by the chopper. The whole is a little over four feet long. The head nine or ten inches and the handle about three and a half feet, but all one piece. It was apparently of a young tree, or perhaps a limb, about four inches in diameter with a regular excrescence about it still, eight or nine inches in diameter. This head had been smoothed or trimmed and made more regular by the axe, cut off rather square at the end, and the lower part cut down to a handle of convenient size. And thus the chopper had made in a few moments in the woods a really effi- cient implement, with his axe only, out of some of the very wood he wished to split. A natural beetle. There was no danger that the handle would come off or the head crack. It needed no ringing. And thus he saved the head of his axe. We are singularly pleased and ~ contented when a mere excrescence is thus converted into a convenient implement. Who was it, what satyr, that invented this rustic beetle? It was shaped: An indispensable piece of woodcraft.