21 March 1859 – 27 March 1859

6 a. m.— The water has fairly begun to fall. It was at its height the 17th; fell a little — two or three inches — the morning of the 18th. On‘ the 18th it rained very considerably all day, which would ordinarily have raised the river a foot, or perhaps two, but, the wind being very strong from the southwest, it only prevented its falling any more until this morning. It did not probably raise it more than two inches. Of course, there could not have been much melted snow and ice to be added to the last rain about the sources of the river, since they are considerably further south, where the ground must have been much more bare than here. A crow blackbird. P. M. — Sail to Fair Haven Pond. A strong northwest wind. Draw my boat over the road on a roller. Raising a stone for ballast from the south side of the railroad causeway, where it is quite sunny and warm, I find the under sides very densely covered with little ants, all stirrmg and evidently ready to come out, if some have not already. They feel the heat through the stone on the ground. It blowed very smartly in gusts, and my boat scud along this way and that, not minding its helm much, as if it were lifted partly out of water. I went from point to point as quickly as you could say “here” and “there.” I see a female marsh hawk sailing and hunting over Potter’s Swamp. I not only see the white rump but the very pe- tle —— culiar crescent-shaped curve of its wings. Fair Haven Pond is only two thirds open. The east end is frozen still, and the body of the ice has drifted in to shore a rod or two, before the northwest wind, and its edge crumbled against the trees. I see, on a yellow lily root washed up, leaf-buds grown five or six inches, or even seven or eight, with the stems. Everywhere for several days the alder catkins have dangled long and loose, the most alive apparently of any tree. ‘They seem to welcome the water which half covers them. ‘The willow catkins are also very con- spicuous, in silvery masses rising above the flood. TI see several white pine cones in the path by Wheil- don’s which appear to have fallen in the late strong winds, but perhaps the ice in the winter took them off. - Others still hold on. From the evening of March 18th to this, the even- ing of the 21st, we have had uninterrupted strong wind, — till the evening of the 19th very strong south- west wind, then and since northwest, — three days of strong wind.

P. M.— The wind changes to easterly and is more raw, 2. e. cool and moist, and the air thick- ens as if it would rain. Returning from Poplar Hill through the west end of Sleepy Hollow, it is very still, the air thick, just ready ~ to rain, and I hear there, on the apple trees and small oaks, the tree sparrows and hyemalis singing very ‘pleasantly. I hear the lively jingle of the hyemalis and the sweet notes of the tree sparrow, canary-like, — svar svar, svit vit vit vit vit, the last part with increas- ing rapidity. Both species in considerable numbers, singing together as they flit along, make a very lively concert. They sing as loud and full as ever now. There has been no sweeter warble than this of the tree spar- row as yet. It is a peculiarly still hour now, when the first drops of rain begin to be heard on the dry leaves around me, and, looking up, I see very high in the air two large birds, which, at that height, with their narrow wings, flying southeast, looked, 2. e. were shaped, like night- hawks. I think they were gulls. The great scarlet oak has now lost almost every leaf, while the white oak near it still retains them. C. says he saw fox-colored sparrows this afternoon.

P. M.— Walk to Cardinal Shore and sail to Well Meadow and Lee’s Cliff. It clears up at 2 P. M. The Lycoperdon stellatum are numerous and blos- somed out widely in Potter’s Path by Bare Hill, after the rain of the night. As we sail upward toward the pond, we scare up two or three golden-eyes, or whistlers, showing their large black heads and black backs, and afterward I watch one swimming not far before us and see the white spot, amid the black, on the side of his head. I have now no doubt that I saw some on the 21st flying here, and it is very likely that Rice saw them here on the 17th, as he says. The pond may be said to be open to-day. There is, however, quite a large mass of ice, which has drifted, since the east wind arose yesterday noon, from the east side over to the north of the Island. This ice, of which there may be eight or ten acres, is so very dark, almost black, that it is hard to discern till you are just upon it, though some little pieces which we broke off and left on its edge were very visible for half a mile. When at the edge of this field of ice, it was a very dark gray in color, had none of the usual whiteness of ice. It was about six inches thick, but was most completely honeycombed. ‘The upper surface was not only thus dark, dusky, or blackish, but full of little hollows three to six inches across, and the whole mass undulated with the waves very much, irregular cracks alternately opening and closing in it, yet it was well knitted to- gether. With my paddle I could depress it six inches on the edge, and cause it to undulate like a blanket for a rod or more, and yet it bore us securely when we stepped out upon it, and it was by no means easy to break off or detach a piece a foot wide. In short, it was thoroughly honeycombed and, as it were, saturated with water. The masses broken off reminded me of some very decayed and worm-eaten interiors of trees. Yet the small cakes into which it visibly cracked when you bent it and made it undulate were knitted together or dovetailed somewhat like the plates of a tortoise-shell, and immediately returned to their places. Dy ] Though it would bear you, the creaking of one such part on another was a quite general and considerable noise, and one detached mass, rubbed in your hand upon the edge of the field, yielded a singular metallic or ringing sound, evidently owing to its hollowness or innumerable perforations. It had a metallic ring. The moment you raised a mass from the water, it was very distinctly white and brilliant, the water running out from it. This was the relic of that great mass which I saw on the 21st on the east side. There was a great quantity of bayonet rush, also, drifted over here and strewn along the shore. ‘This and the pontederia are the coarsest of the wrack. Now is the time, then, that it is added to the wrack, prob- ably being ripped up by the ice. It reminds you of the collections of seaweed after a storm, — this river-weed after the spring freshets have melted and dispersed the ice. The ice thus helps essentially to clear the shore. I am surprised to see one of those sluggish ghost- horses alive on the ice. It was probably drifted from the shore by the flood and here lodged. That dark, uneven ice has a peculiarly coarse-grained appearance, it is so much decomposed. ‘The pieces are interlocked by the irregularities of the perpendicu- lar combing. ‘The under side presents the most con- tinuous surface, and it is held together chiefly on that side. One piece rings when struck on another, like a trowel on a brick, and as we rested against the edge of this ice, we heard a singular wheezing and grating sound, which was the creaking of the ice, which was undulating under the waves and wind. As we entered Well Meadow, we saw a hen-hawk perch on the topmost plume of one of the tall pines at the head of the meadow. Soon another appeared, prob- ably its mate, but we looked in vain for a nest there. It was a fine sight, their soaring above our heads, pre- senting a perfect outline 4\ and, as they came round, showing their rust-colored > tails with a whitish rump, é ; or, as they sailed away from us, that slight teeter- ing or quivering motion of their dark-tipped wings seen edgewise, now on this side, now that, by which they balanced and directed themselves. These are the most eagle-like of our common hawks. They very com- monly perch upon the very topmost plume of a pine, and, if motionless, are rather hard to distinguish there. The cowslip and most of the. skunk-cabbage there have been and are still drowned by flood; else we should find more in bloom. As it is, I see the skunk- cabbage in bloom, but generally the growth of both has been completely checked by the water. While reconnoitring there, we hear the peep of one hylodes somewhere in this sheltered recess in the woods. And afterward, on the Lee side, I hear a single croak from a wood frog. We cross to Lee’s shore and sit upon the bare rocky ridge overlooking the flood southwest and northeast. It is quite sunny and sufficiently warm. I see one or two of the small fuzzy gnats in the air. The prospect thence is a fine one, especially at this season, when the water ~ } is high. The landscape is very agreeably diversified with hill and vale and meadow and cliff. As we look southwest, how attractive the shores of russet capes and peninsulas laved by the flood! Indeed, that large tract east of the bridge is now an island. How fair that low, undulating russet land! At this season and under these circumstances, the sun just come out and the flood high around it, russet, so reflecting the light of the sun, appears to me the most agreeable of colors, and I begin to dream of a russet fairyland and elysium. How dark and terrene must be green! but this smooth russet surface reflects almost all the light. ‘That broad and low but firm island, with but few trees to conceal the contour of the ground and its outline, with its fine russet sward, firm and soft as velvet, reflecting so much light, —all the undulations of the earth, its nerves and muscles, revealed by the light and shade, and even the sharper ridgy edge of steep banks where the plow has heaped up the earth from year to year, — this is a sort of fairyland and elysium to my eye. The tawny couchant island! Dry land for the Indian’s wigwam in the spring, and still strewn with his arrow-points. The sight of such land reminds me of the pleasant spring days in which I have walked over such tracts, looking for these relics. How well, too, this smooth, firm, light-reflecting, tawny earth contrasts with the darker water which surrounds it, —or perchance lighter sometimes! At this season, when the russet colors pre- vail, the contrast of water and land is more agreeable to behold. What an inexpressibly soft curving line is the shore! Or if the water is perfectly smooth and yet rising, you seem to see it raised an eighth of an inch with swelling lip above the immediate shore it kisses, as in a cup or the of [sc] a saucer. Indian isles and promontories. Thus we sit on that rock, hear the first wood frog’s croak, and dream of a russet elysium. Enough for the season is the beauty thereof. Spring has a beauty of its own which we would not exchange for that of summer, and at this moment, if I imagine the fairest earth I can, it is still russet, such is the color of its blessed isles, and they are surrounded with the phenomena of spring. The qualities of the land that are most attractive to our eyes now are dryness and firmness. It is not the rich black soil, but warm and sandy hills and plains which tempt our steps. We love to sit on and walk over sandy tracts in the spring like cicindelas. ‘These tongues of russet land tapering and sloping into the flood do almost speak to one. They are alternately in sun and shade. When the cloud is passed, and they reflect their pale-brown light to me, I am tempted to go to them. I think I have already noticed within a week how very agreeably and strongly the green of small pines contrasts with the russet of a hillside pasture now. Perhaps there is no color with which green contrasts more strongly. I see the shadow of a cloud — and it chances to be a hollow ring with sunlight in its midst — passing over the hilly sprout-land toward the Baker house, a sprout- land of oaks and birches; and, owing to the color of the birch twigs, perhaps, this shadow turns all from a russet to a decided dark-purplish color as it moves along. And then, as I look further along eastward in the horizon, I am surprised to see strong purple and violet tinges in the sun, from a hillside a mile off densely covered with full-grown birches. It is the steep old corn-field hillside of Jacob Baker’s. I would not have believed that under the spring sun so many colors were brought out. It is not the willows only that shine, but, under favorable circumstances, many other twigs, even a mile or two off. The dense birches, so far that their white stems are not distinct, reflect deep, strong purple and violet colors from the distant hillsides op- posite to the sun. Can this have to do with the sap flowing in them? As we sit there, we see coming, swift and straight, northeast along the river valley, not seeing us and there- fore not changing his course, a male goosander, so near that the green reflections of his head and neck are plainly visible. He looks like a paddle-wheel steamer, so oddly painted up, black and white and green, and moves along swift and straight like one. Ere long the same returns with his mate, the red-throated, the male tak- ing the lead. The loud peop (?) of a pigeon woodpecker is heard in our sea [?], and anon the prolonged loud and shrill cackle, calling the thin-wooded hillsides and pastures to life. It is like the note of an alarm-clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly this date. Up up up up up up up up up! What a rustling it seems to make among the dry leaves! You can now sit on sunny sheltered sprout-land hillsides and enjoy the sight and sound of rustling dry leaves. Then I see come slowly flying from the southwest a great gull, of voracious form, which at length by a sudden and steep descent alightsin Fair Haven Pond, scaring up a crow which was seeking its food on the edge of the ice. This shows that the crows get along the meadow’s edge also what has washed up. It is suggested that the blue is darkest when reflected from the most agitated water, because of the shadow (occasioned by the inequalities) mingled with it. Some Indians of the north have but one word for blue and black, and blue is with us considered the darkest color, though it is the color of the sky or air. Light, I should say, was white; the absence of it, black. Hold up to the light a perfectly opaque body and you get black, but hold up to it the least opaque body, such as air, and you get blue. Hence you may say that blue is light seen through a veil.

P. M.— Down railroad. Southeast wind. Begins to sprinkle while I am sit- ting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking. I think they get under weigh a little earlier, 2. e., you will hear many of them sooner than you will hear many hylodes. Now, when the leaves get to be dry and rustle under your feet, dried by the March winds, the peculiar dry note, wurrk wurrk wur-r-r-k wurk of the wood frog is heard faintly by ears on the alert, borne up from some unseen pool in a wood- land hollow which is open to the influences of the sun. It is a singular sound for awakening Nature to make, associated with the first warmer days, when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. How moderate on her first awakening, how little demonstrative ! You may sit half an hour before you will hear another. You doubt if the season will be long enough for such Oriental and luxurious slow- ness. But they get on, nevertheless, and by to-morrow, or in a day or two, they croak louder and more fre- quently. Can you ever be sure that you have heard the very first wood frog in the township croak? Ah! how weather-wise must he be! There is no guessing at the weather with him. He makes the weather in his degree; he encourages it to be mild. The weather, what is it but the temperament of the earth? and he is wholly of the earth, sensitive as its skin in which he lives and of which he is a part. His life relaxes with the thawing ground. He pitches and tunes his voice to chord with the rustling leaves which the March wind has dried. Long before the frost is quite out, he feels the influence of the spring rains and the warmer days. His is the very voice of the weather. He rises and falls like quicksilver in the thermometer. You do not perceive the spring so surely in the actions of men, their lives are so artificial. They may make more fire or less in their parlors, and their feelings accordingly are not good thermometers. The frog far away in the wood, that burns no coal nor wood, perceives more surely the general and universal changes.

A rainy day. P. M. — To Clamshell. I heard the what what what what of the nuthatch this forenoon. Do I ever hear it m the afternoon? It is much like the cackle of the pigeon woodpecker and suggests a relation to that bird. Again I walk in the rain and see the rich yellowish browns of the moist banks. These Clamshell hills and neighboring promontories, though it is a dark and rainy day, reflect a certain yellowish light from the wet withered grass which is very grateful to my eyes, as also the darker more reddish browns, as the radical leaves of the Andropogon scoparius in low tufts here and there. (Its culms, where they stand, are quite light yellow.) Surely russet is not the name which de- scribes the fields and hillsides now, whether wet or dry. There is not red enough in it. I do not know a better name for this (when wet) yellowish brown than “ tawny.” On the south side of these warm hills, it may perhaps. be called one of the fawn-colors, 2. e. brown inclining to green. Much of this peculiar yellowish color on the surface of the Clamshell plain is due to a little curled sedge or grass growing at short intervals, loosely cov- ering the ground (with green mosses intermixed) in little tufts of 33 eS G3} like curled hair. I saw yesterday, in Laurel Glen, where the early sedge had been grazed very close to the ground, and the same, perhaps digested, fine as green-paint dust, lay around. Was it the work of a mouse? Day before yesterday, in clear, dry weather, we had pale-brown or fawn-colored earth, 2. e., a dry, withered grass blade [color]; to-day, a more yellow brown or tawny, the same being wet. ‘The wet brings out an agreeable yellow light, as if the sun were shining through a mist on it. The earth is more truly russet in Novem- ber, when there is more redness left in the withered and withering vegetation. Such is the change in the color of the bare portions of the earth (2. e. bare of trees and bushes) produced by rain. Also the oak leaves are much redder. In fair weather the light color of these objects was simply a light reflected from them, originating in the sun and sky; now it is a more proper and inward light, which attracts and confines our at- tention to moist sward itself. A snipe flies away from the moist Clamshell shore, uttering its cr-a-ack c-r-r-rack. I thought the other day, How we enjoy a warm and pleasant day at this season! We dance like gnats in the sun. A score of my townsmen have been shooting and trapping musquash and mink of late. Some have got nothing else to do. If they should strike for higher wages now, instead of going to the clam-banks, as the Lynn shoemakers propose, they would go to shooting musquash. ‘They are gone all day; early and late they scan the rising tide; stealthily they set their traps in remote swamps, avoiding one another. Am not I a trapper too, early and late scanning the rising flood, ranging by distant wood-sides, setting my traps in soli- tude, and baiting them as well as I know how, that I may catch life and light, that my intellectual part ™~ may taste some venison and be invigorated, that my nakedness may be clad in some wild, furry warmth? The color of spring hitherto, — I should say that in dry weather it was fawn-colored, m wet more yellow- ish or tawny. When wet, the green of the fawn is sup- plied by the lichens and the mosses.

P. M.— To Conantum wa Cardinal Shore and boat. The river has gone down considerably, but the rain of yesterday and to-day has checked its fall somewhat. Much earth has been washed away from the roots of grasses and weeds along the banks of the river, and many of those pretty little bodkin bulbs are exposed and so transported to new localities. This seems to be the way in which they are spread. I see many smallish ants on the red carcass of a mus- quash just skinned and lying on the bank, cold and wet as the weather is. They love this animal food. On the top of the hill at Lee’s Cliff much wintergreen has been eaten; at least a great many leaves are lying loose, strewn about. I find washed up on the (Cardinal) shore a little bream about an inch and an eighth long, very much like those found at Walden last fall. It has about seven transverse bars, a similar dorsal fin, a reddish-copper iris, with the black vertical dash through the eye. I think it must be one of the common breams of the river, — though I see only the black spot on the operculum and not any red one,—and apparently all the young are thus striped (7). What was that large rather grayish duck on Fair Haven Pond this afternoon? It was far off. Was it a last year’s male sheldrake, or a female, or another ?

7 a. M.— Was that the Alauda, shore lark (?), which flew up from the corn-field beyond Texas house, and dashed off so swiftly with a peculiar note, — a small flock of them? P. M.—Sail from Cardinal Shore up Otter Bay, close to Deacon Farrar’s. I see a gull flying over Fair Haven Pond which ap- pears to have a much duskier body beneath than the common ‘near by, though about the same size. Can it be another species ? The wind is so nearly west to-day that we sail up from Cardinal Shore to the pond, and from the road up what I will call Otter Bay, behind Farrar’s, and, returning, sail from the road at Creel (or Pole) Brook to Pond Island and from Hallowell willows to rail- road. 'The water is quite high still, and we sail up Otter Bay, I think, more than half a mile, to within a very short distance of Farrar’s. This is an interesting and wild place. There is an abundance of low willows whose cat- kins are now conspicuous, risiug four to six or seven feet above the water, thickly placed on long wand-like osiers. ‘They look, when you look from the sun, like dead gray twigs or branches (whose wood is exposed) of bushes in the light, but, nearer, are recognized for the pretty bright buttons of the willow. We sail by masses of these silvery buttons two or three rods long, rising above the water. By their color they have rela- tion to the white clouds and the sky and to the snow and ice still lingering in a few localities. In order to see these silvery buttons in the greatest profusion, you must sail amid them on some flooded meadow or swamp like this. Our whole course, as we wind about in this bay, is lined also with the alder, whose pretty tassels, now many of them in full bloom, are hanging straight down, suggesting in a peculiar manner the influence of gravity, or are regularly blown one side. \N A) It is remarkable how modest and fe aw unobtrusive these early flowers are. The musquash and duck hunter or the farmer might and do commonly pass by them with[out] perceiving them. ‘They steal into the air and light of spring without being noticed for the most part. The sports- man seems to see a mass of weather-stained dead twigs showing their wood and partly covered with gray lichens and moss, and the flowers of the alder, now partly in bloom, maybe half, make the impression at a little distance of a collection of the brown twigs of winter — also are of the same color with many withered leaves. Twenty rods off, masses of alder in bloom look hke masses of bare brown twigs, last year’s twigs, and would be taken for such. | Of our seven indigenous flowers which begin to bloom in March, four, 7. e. the two alders, the aspen, and the hazel, are not generally noticed so early, if at all, and most do not observe the flower of a fifth, the white maple. The first four are yellowish or reddish brown at a little distance, like the banks and sward moistened by the spring rain. The browns are the prevailing shades as yet, as in the withered grass and sedge and the surface of the earth, the withered leaves, and these brown flowers. I see from a hilltop a few very bright green spots a rod in diameter in the upper part of Farrar’s meadow, which the water has left within a day or two. Going there, I find that a very powerful spring is welling up there, which, with water warm from the bowels of the earth, has caused the grass and several weeds, as Cardamine rhomboidea, etc., to grow thus early and luxuriantly, and perhaps it has been helped by the flood standing over it for some days. These are bright liquid green in the midst of brown and withered grass and leaves. Such are the spots where the grass is green- est now. C. says that he saw a turtle dove on the 25th. It is remarkable how long many things may be pre- served by excluding the air and light and dust, mois- ture, etc. Those chalk-marks on the chamber-floor joists and timbers of the Hunt house, one of which was read by many “Feb. 1666,” and all of which were in an ancient style of writing and expression,—‘“‘ye”’ for “ the,” etc., “enfine Brown,’ — were as fresh when ex- posed (having been plastered and cased over) as if made the day before. Yet a single day’s rain com- pletely obliterated some of them. Cousin Charles says that, on the timbers of a very old house recently taken down in Haverhill, the chalk-marks made by the framers, numbering the sticks, [were] as fresh as if just made. I saw a large timber over the middle of the best room of the Hunt house which had been cased, according to all accounts, at least a hundred years ago, the cas- ing having just been taken off. I saw that the timber appeared to have been freshly hewn on the under side, and I asked the carpenter who was taking down the house what he had been hewing that timber for, — for it had evidently been done since it was put up and in a very inconvenient position, and I had no doubt that he had just done it, for the surface was as fresh and distinct from the other parts as a fresh whittling, —but he answered to my surprise that he had not touched it, it was so when he took the casing off. When the casing was put on, it had been roughly hewn by one standing beneath it, in order to reduce its thickness or perhaps to make it more level than it was. So dis- tinct and peculiar is the weather-stain, and so inde- finitely it may be kept off if you do not allow this painter to come [?] to your wood. Cousin Charles says that he took out of the old Haverhill house a very broad panel from over the fire- place, which had a picture of Haverhill at some old period on it. The panel had been there perfectly shel- tered in an inhabited house for more than a hundred years. It was placed in his shop and no moisture allowed to come near it, and yet it shrunk a quarter of an inch in width when the air came to both sides of it.