20 December 1858 – 26 December 1858

Walden is frozen over, except two small spots, less than half an acre in all, in middle.

P. M. — To Walden. I see in the cut near the shanty-site quite a flock of F. hyemalis and goldfinches together, on the snow and weeds and ground. Hear the well-known mew and watery twitter of the last and the drier chilt chilt of the former. ‘These burning yellow birds with a little black and white on their coat-flaps look warm above the snow. There may be thirty goldfinches, very brisk and pretty tame. They hang head downwards on the weeds. I hear of their coming to pick sunflower seeds in Melvin’s garden these days. The pond is no more frozen than on the 20th. I see where a rabbit has hopped across it in the slosh last night, making a track larger than a man’s ordinarily is.

P. M. — To Eddy Bridge. Colder last night. Walden undoubtedly frozen at last, — what was left to freeze.’ See a shrike on the top of an oak. It sits still, plum- ing itself. At first, when it was flying, I thought it a hairy woodpecker. How perfectly at home the musquash is on our river. And then there is an abundance of clams, a wholesome diet for him, to be had for the diving for them. I do not know that he has any competition in this chase, unless it is an occasional otter. The clams are a sizable fish and in time of scarcity would not be contemptible food for man.

‘Those two places in middle of Walden not frozen over yet, though it was quite cold last night! See another shrike this afternoon, — the fourth this winter! It looks much smaller than a Jay.

P. M.— Up river on ice to Fair Haven Pond and across to Walden. The ground is still for the most part bare. Such a December is at least as hard a month to get through as November. You come near eating your heart now.

P. M. — To Jenny Dugan’s. I walk over the meadow above railroad bridge, where the withered grass rises above the ice, the river being low. I notice that water has oozed out over the edge of this ice or next the meadow’s edge on the west, not having come from the river but evidently from springs in the bank. This thin water is turned to a slush of crystals as thick as mortar nearly, and will soon be solid ice. Call at a farmer’s this Sunday afternoon, where I sur- prise the well-to-do masters of the house lounging in very ragged clothes (for which they think it necessary to apologize), and one of them is busy laying the supper- table (at which he invites me to sit down at last), bring- ing up cold meat from the cellar and a lump of butter on the end of his knife, and making the tea by the time his mother gets home from church. Thus sincere and homely, as I am glad to know, is the actual life of these New England men, wearing rags indoors there which would disgrace a beggar (and are not beggars and paupers they who could be disgraced so?) and doing the indispensable work, however humble. How much better and more humane it was than if they had im- ported and set up among their Penates a headless torso from the ruins of Ireland! I am glad to find that our New England life has a genuine humane core to it; that inside, after all, there is so little pretense and brag. Better than that, methinks, is the hard drinking and quarrelling which we must allow is not uncommon there. The middle-aged son sits there in the old unpainted house in a ragged coat, and helps his old mother about her work when the field does not demand him.