26 December 1859 – 31 December 1859

P. M.—Skate to Lee’s Bridge and there measure back, by pacing, the breadth of the river. After being uniformly overcast all the forenoon, still and moderate weather, it begins to snow very gradually, at first imperceptibly, this afternoon, —at first I thought I imagined it, — and at length begins to snow in earnest about 6 Pp. M., but lasts only a few minutes.

A very cold morning, — about —15° at 8 a. M. at our door. . I went to the river immediately after sunrise. I could [see] a little greenness in the ice, and also a little rose- color from the snow, but far less than before the sun set. Do both these phenomena require a gross atmos- phere? Apparently the ice is greenest when the sun is twenty or thirty minutes above the horizon. From the smooth open place behind Cheney’s a great deal of vapor was rising to the height of a dozen feet or more, as from a boiling kettle. This, then, is a phe- nomenon of quite cold weather. I did not notice it yesterday afternoon. These open places are a sort of breathing-holes of the river. When I look toward the sun, now that they are smooth, they are hardly to be distinguished from the ice. Just as cold weather re- veals the breath of a man, still greater cold reveals the breath of, 2. e. warm, moist air over, the river. I collect this morning the little shining black seeds of the amaranth, raised above the snow in its solid or dense spike. P. M. — To Ball’s Hill, skating. Walked back, measuring the river and ice by pacing.! The first open place in the main stream in Concord, or no doubt this side Carlisle Bridge, coming up- stream, were [szc] : — Ist, Holt Ford, 10 rods by 1 (extreme width). 2d, east side Holt Bend, near last, 8 by 14. 3d, west side Holt Bend (midway), 3 by 4. (On the 28th it must have been open nearly all round to Holt Bend.) 4th, Barrett’s Bar, 42 rods by 6 at west end, where it reaches 12 rods above ford; extends down the north side very narrow to the rock and only little way down the south side; can walk in middle half-way. 5th, a bar above Monument, 10 by 8. 6th, from Hunt’s Bridge to Island, or say 54 rods by 4. 7th, from 8 below willow-row to 5 below boat’s place, or 80+ rods by 3. This as far as I looked to-day, but no doubt? the next was :— 8th, just above ash tree, probably three or four rods long. ? Proved by looking the 30th. 9th, at Hubbard’s Bath Bend. 10th, Clamshell Bend. 11th, below Nut Meadow, probably two or three rods long. This is the last in Concord. (I do not include the small openings which are to be found now at bridges.) The longest opening is that below my boat’s place; next, at junction next Barrett’s Bar; next, either Clam- shell or Hubbard’s Bath. But for area of water that below the junction is considerably the largest of all.’

I awake to find it snowing fast, but it slack- ens ina few hours. Perhaps seven or eight inches have fallen, — the deepest snow yet, and almost quite level. At first the flakes (this forenoon) were of middling size. At noon, when it was leaving off, they were of a different character. I observed them on my sleeve, — little slender spiculze about one tenth of an inch long, little dry splinters, sometimes two forking, united at one end, or two or three lying across one another, quite dry and fine; and so it concluded. P. M. — Going by Dodd’s, I see a shrike perched on the tip-top of the topmost upright twig of an Eng- lish cherry tree before his house, standing square on the topmost bud, balancing himself by a slight motion of his tail from time to time. I have noticed this habit of the bird before. You would suppose it inconven- ient for so large a bird to maintain its footing there. Scared by my passing [?] in the road, it flew off, and I thought I would see if it alighted on a similar place. It flew toward a young elm, whose higher twigs were much more slender, though not quite so upright as those of the cherry, and I thought he might be excused if he alighted on the side of one; but no, to my surprise, he alighted without any trouble upon the very top of one of the highest of all, and looked around as before. I spoke to the barber to-day about that whirl of hair on the occiput of most (if not all) men’s heads. He said it was called the crown, and was of a spiral form, a beginning spiral, when cut short; that some had two, one on the right, the other on the left, close together. ‘I said that they were in a sense double-headed. He said that it was an old saying that such were bred under two crowns. I noticed the other day that even the golden-crested wren was one of the winter birds which have a black head, —in this case divided by yellow. Those who depend on skylights found theirs but a dim, religious light this forenoon and hitherto, owing to the thickness of snow resting on them. Also cellar windows are covered, and cellars are accordingly darkened. What a different phenomenon a musquash now from what it is in summer! Now if one floats, or swims, its whole back out, or crawls out upon the ice at one of those narrow oval water spaces in the river, some twenty rods long (in calm weather, smooth mirrors), in a broad frame of white ice or yet whiter snow, it is seen at once, as conspicuous (or more so) as a fly on a window-pane or a mirror. But in summer, how many hundreds craw] along the weedy shore or plunge in the long river unsuspected by the boatman! Even if the musquash is not there I often see the open clam- shell on the edge of the ice, perfectly distinct a long way off, and he is betrayed. However, the edges of these silver lakes, — winter lakes, late freezers, swift- waters, musquash mirrors, breathing-holes, — to-day, after the morning’s snow, are, by the water flowing back over the thin edges and staining the snow, a dis- tinct yellow (brown-yellow) tinge for a rod or two on every side. This shows what and how much coloring matter there is in the river water. I doubt if. it would be so at Walden. No doubt, however, we here get the impurer parts of the river, the scum as it were, repeat- edly washed over at these places.

Thermometer at 7.45 a.m.,—1°, yet even more vapor is rising from the open water below my boat’s place than on the 29th, when it was — 15°. The wind is southwesterly, 7. e. considerably south of west. ‘This shows that fog over the water is a phenome- non of the morning chiefly, as well in winter as in sum- mer. You will see a fog over the water in a winter morning, though the temperature may be considerably higher than at midday when no fog is seen. There has evidently been a slight fog generally in the night, and the trees are white with it. The crystals are directed southwesterly, or toward the wind. I think that these crystals are particularly large and numerous, and the trees (willows) particularly white, next to the open water spaces, where the vapor even now is abundantly rising. Is this fog in the night occa- sioned by the cold earth condensing the moisture which a warmer wind has brought to us? At 10 a. m., thermometer 18°. I see no vapor from the water. Crows yesterday flitted silently, if not ominously, over the street, just after the snow had fallen, as if men, being further within, were just as far off as usual. This is a phenomenon of both cold weather and snowy. You hear nothing; you merely see these black appari- tions, though they come near enough to look down your chimney and scent the boiling pot, and pass between the house and barn. Just saw moved a white oak, Leighton’s, some five inches in diameter, with a frozen mass of earth some five or five and a half feet in diameter and two plus thick. It was dug round before the frost, —a trench about a foot wide and filled with stalks, etc., —and now pried up with levers till on a level with the ground, then dragged off. It would not have cost half so much if a sloping path had been dug to it on one side so that the drag could have been placed under it in the hole and another dug at the hole it was removed to, — unless the last were planked over and it was dragged on to it. They were teaming ice before sunrise (from Sam Barrett’s Pond) on the morning of the 29th, when the thermometer was 16 or 20 degrees below. Cold work, you would say. Yet some say it is colder in thawing weather, if you have to touch the ice. P. M.— To the sweet-gale meadow or swamp up Assabet. I notice that one or more of the terminal leafets re- main on the branches of the flowering fern commonly. See where probably a shrike (do I ever see a small hawk in winter?) has torn a small bird in pieces and its slate-colored down and its feathers have been blown far and wide over the snow. There is a great deal of hemlock scales scattered over the recent snow (at the Hemlocks), evidently by birds on the trees, and the wind has blown them south- east, — scales, seeds, and cones, — and I see the tracks of small birds that have apparently picked the seeds from the snow also. It may have been done by gold- finches. I see a tree sparrow hopping close by, and perhaps they eat them on the snow. Some of the seeds have blown at least fifteen rods southeast. So the hem- lock seed is important to some birds in the winter. All the sound witch-hazel nuts that I examine are empty. How vain to try to teach youth, or anybody, truths! They can only learn them after their own fashion, and when they get ready. I do not mean by this to condemn our system of education, but to show what it amounts to. A hundred boys at college are drilled in physics and metaphysics, languages, etc. There may be one or two in each hundred, prematurely old perchance, who approaches the subject from a similar point of view to his teachers, but as for the rest, and the most promising, it is ike agricultural chemistry to so many Indians. They get a valuable drilling, it may be, but they do not learn what you profess to teach. They at most only learn where the arsenal is, in case they should ever want to use any of its weapons. The young men, being young, necessarily listen to the lec- turer in history, just as they do to the singing of a bird.