16 March 1857 – 22 March 1857

To Cambridge and Boston.

These days, beginning with the 14th, more springlike. Last night it rained a little, carrying off nearly all the little snow that remained, but this morn- ing it is fair, and I hear the note of the woodpecker on the elms (that early note) and the bluebird again. Launch my boat. No mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of the spring, but he will presently discover some evidence that vegetation had awaked some days at least before. Early as I have looked this year, perhaps the first unquestionable growth of an indigenous plant de- tected was the fine tips of grass blades which the frost had killed, floating pale and flaccid, though still at- tached to their stems, spotting the pools like a slight fall or flurry of dull-colored snowflakes. After a few mild and sunny days, even in February, the grass in still muddy pools or ditches sheltered by the surround- ing banks, which reflect the heat upon it, ventures to lift the points of its green phalanx into the mild and flattering atmosphere, advances rapidly from the saffron even to the rosy tints of morning. But the following night comes the frost, which, with rude and ruthless hand, sweeps the surface of the pool, and the advancing morning pales into the dim light of earliest dawn. I — thus detect the first approach of spring by finding here , and there its scouts and vanguard which have been | slain by the rear-guard of retreating winter.

9 a. mM. — Up Assabet. A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain. I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard a day or two. The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside. I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, look- ing for muskrats and from time to time picking drift- wood —logs and boards, etc. — out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with. He says that the frost is not out so that he can lay wall, and so he thought he [’d] go and see what there was at Fair Haven. Says that when you hear a woodpecker’s rat-tat-iat-tat-tat on a dead tree it is a sign of rain. While Emerson sits writing [in] his study this still, overcast, moist day, Goodwin is paddling up the still, dark river. Emerson burns twenty-five cords of wood and fourteen (?) tons of coal; Goodwin per- haps a cord and a half, much of which he picks out of the river. He says he ’d rather have a boat leak some for fishing. I hear the report of his gun from time to time for an hour, heralding the death of a muskrat and reverberating far down the river. Goodwin had just seen Melvin disappearing up the North River, and I turn up thither after him. The ice-belt still clings to the bank on each side, a foot or more above the water, and is now fringed with icicles of various lengths, only an inch or two apart, where it is melting by day and dripping into the river. Being dis- tinctly reflected, you think you see two, two feet apart, the water-line not being seen. IT land and walk half-way up the hill. A red squirrel runs nimbly before me along the wall, his tail in the air at a right angle with his body; leaps into a walnut and winds up his clock. The reindeer lichens on the pitch pine plain are moist and flaccid. I hear the faint fine notes of apparent nuthatches coursing up the pitch pines, a pair of them, one answering to the other, as it were like a vibrating watch-spring. Then, at a distance, that whar-whar- whar-whar-whar-whar, which after all I suspect may be the note of the nuthatch and not a woodpecker. And now from far southward coming on through the air, the chattering of blackbirds, — probably red-wings, for I hear an imperfect conqueree. Also I hear the chill-lill or tchit-a-tchit of the slate-colored sparrow, and see it. On the pitch pine plain, nearly the whole of a small turtle’s egg, by the side of its excavated nest. Save with my boat the dead top of (apparently) a pine, divested of its bark and bleached. Before the bark fell off it was curiously etched by worms in vari- ously curved lines and half-circles, often | with regular short recurving branches, of thus: Pére Buteux, going on commission to the Attika- mégues in 1651, describes a fall away up there, where a river falls into a sort of trough or cradle a hundred paces long. “In this cradle the river boils (boudllonne) in such a fashion, that if you cast a stick (baston) into it, it remains some time without appearing, then all at once it elevates itself (al s’éléve en haut) to the height of two pikes, at forty or fifty paces from the place where you cast it in.” It is to be observed that in the old deed of the Hunt farm, written in 1701, though the whole, consisting of something more than one hundred and fifty acres, is minutely described in thirteen different pieces, no part is described as woodland or wood-lot, only one piece as partly unimproved. ‘This shows how little account was made of wood. Mr. Nathan Brooks reminds me that not till recently, 7. e. not till within forty years, have wood-lots begun to be taxed for anything like their full value.

Heavy rain in the night and to-day, i.e. A.M. This, as usual, rapidly settles the ways, for, taking the frost out, the water that stood on the surface’ is soaked up, so that it is even drier and better walk- ing before this heavy rain is over than it was yesterday before it began. It is April weather. I observed yes- terday a dead shiner by the riverside, and to-day the first sucker.

Dine with Agassiz at R. W. E.’s. He thinks that the suckers die of asphyxia, having very large air-bladders and being in the habit of coming to the surface for air. But then, he is thinking of a different phenomenon from the one I speak of, which last is confined to the very earliest spring or winter. He says that the Emys picta does not copulate till seven years old, and then does not lay till four years after copulation, or when eleven years old. The Cis- tudo Blandingui (which he has heard of in Massachu- setts only at Lancaster) copulates at eight or nine years of age. He says this is not a Cistudo but an Emys. He has eggs of the serpentina from which the young did not come forth till the next spring. He thinks that the Esquimau dog is the only indigenous one in the United States. He had not observed the silvery appearance and the dryness of the lycoperdon fungus in water which I showed. He had broken caterpillars and found the crystals of ice in them, but had not thawed them. When I began to tell him of my experiment on a frozen fish; he said that Pallas had shown that fishes were frozen and thawed again, but I affirmed the contrary, and then Agassiz agreed with me. Says Aristotle describes the care the pouts take of their young. I told him of Tanner’s account of it, the only one I had seen. The river over the meadows again, nearly as high as in February, on account of rain of the 19th.