9 January 1860 – 15 January 1860

Another fine warm day, — 48° at 2 p. M. P. M. — To Walden. I call that ice marbled when shallow puddles of melted snow and rain, with perhaps some slosh in them, resting on old ice, are frozen, showing a slightly internal marbling, or alternation of light and dark spots or streaks. I see, on a slender oak (not white oak) overhanging the pond, two knots which, though near, [ at first mis- took for vireo nests. One was in a fork, too, and both were just the right size and color, if not form. Thus, too, the nests may be concealed to some eyes. I am interested by a clump of young canoe birches on the hillside shore of the pond. There is an inter- esting variety in the colors of their bark, passing from bronze at the earth, through ruddy and copper colors to white higher up, with shreds of different color from that beneath peeling off. Going close to them, | find that at first, or till ten feet high, they are a dark bronze brown, a wholly different-looking shrub from what they afterward become, with some ruddy tinges, and, of course, regular white specks; but when they get to be about two inches in diameter, the outmost cuticle bursts up and down the tree on the south side, and peels off each way, under the influence, probably, of the sun and rain and wind, and perhaps aided some- times by birds. It is as if the tree unbuttoned a thin waistcoat and suffered it to blow aside, revealing its bosom or inner garment, which is a more ruddy brown, or sometimes greenish or coppery; and thus one cuticle peels off after another till it is a ruddy white, as if you saw to a red ground through a white wash; and at length it is snow-white, about five or six feet from the ground, for it is first white there, while the top, where it is smaller and younger, is still dark-brown. It may be, then, half a dozen years old before it assumes the white toga which is its distinctive dress. After the January thaw our thoughts cease to refer to autumn and we look forward to spring. I hear that R. M , 2 rich old farmer who lives in a large house, with a male housekeeper and no other family, gets up at three or four o’clock these winter mornings and milks seventeen cows regularly. When asked why he works so hard he answers that the poor are obliged to work hard. Only think, what a creature of fate he is, this old Jotun, milking his seventeen cows though the thermometer goes down to — 25°, and not knowing why he does it, — draining sixty-eight cows’ teats in the dark of the coldest morning! Think how helpless a rich man who can only do as he has done, and as his neighbors do, one or all of them! What an account he will have to give of himself! He spent some time in a world, alternately cold and warm, and every winter morning, with lantern in hand, when the frost goblins were playing their tricks, he resolutely accom- plished his task and milked his seventeen cows, while the man housekeeper prepared his breakfast! If this were original with him, he would be a hero to be cele- brated in history. Think how tenaciously every man does his deed, of some kind or other, though it be idleness! He is rich, dependent on nobody, and nobody is dependent on him; has as good health as the average, at least, can do as he pleases, as we say. Yet he gravely rises every morning by candle-light, dons his cowhide boots and his frock, takes his lantern and wends to the barn and milks his seventeen cows, milking with one hand while he warms the other against the cow or his person. This is but the beginning of his day, and his Augean stable work. So serious is the life he lives.

The very slight rain of yesterday afternoon turned to snow in the night, and this morning consid- erable has fallen and is still falling. At noon it clears up. About eight inches deep. I go forth to walk on the Hill at 3 p.m. Thermometer about 30°. It is a very beautiful and spotless snow now, it hav- ing just ceased falling. You are struck by its peculiar tracklessness, as if it were a thick white blanket just spread. As it were, each snowflake lies as it first fell, or there is a regular gradation from the denser bottom up to the surface, which is perfectly light, and as it were fringed with the last flakes that fell. This was a star snow, dry, but the stars of considerable size. It lies up light as down. When I look closely it seems to be chiefly composed of crystals in which the six rays or leafets are more or less perfect, with a cottony pow- der intermixed. It is not yet in the least melted by the sun. The sun is out very bright and pretty warm, and, going from the sun, I see a myriad sparkling points scattered over its surface, — little mirror-like facets, which on examination I find to be one of those star wheels (more or less entire) from an eighth to a third of an inch in diameter, which has fallen in the proper position, reflecting an intensely bright little sun, as if it were a thin and uninterrupted scale of mica. Such is the glitter or sparkle on the surface of such a snow freshly fallen when the sun comes out and you walk from it, the points of light constantly changing. I sus- pect that these are good evidence of the freshness of the snow. The sun and wind have not yet destroyed these delicate reflectors. The aspect of the pines now, with their plumes and boughs bent under their burden of snow, is what I call glyphic, like lumpish forms of sculpture, — a certain dumb sculpture. There is a wonderful stillness in the air, so that you hear the least fall of snow from a bough near you, sug- gesting that perhaps it was of late equally still in what you called the snow-storm, except for the motion of the falling flakes and their rustling on the dry leaves, etc. Looking from the hilltop, the pine woods half a mile or a mile distant north and northwest, their sides and brows especially, snowed up like the fronts of houses, look like great gray or grayish-white lichens, cetrarias maybe, attached to the sides of the hills. Those oak ~ woods whose leaves have fallen have caught the snow chiefly on their lower and more horizontal branches, and these look somewhat like ramalina lichens. As I stand by the hemlocks, I am greeted by the lively and unusually prolonged tche de de de de de of a little flock of chickadees. The snow has ceased fall- ing, the sun comes out, and it is warm and still, and this flock of chickadees, little birds that perchance were born in their midst, feeling the influences of this genial season, have begun to flit amid the snow-covered fans of the hemlocks, jarring down the snow, — for there are hardly bare twigs enough for them to rest on, —or they plume themselves in some snug recess on ‘the sunny side of the tree, only PARES to utter their tche de de de. The locust pods, which were abundant, are still, part of them, unopened on the trees. I notice, as I am returning half an hour before sun- set, the thermometer about 24°, much vapor rising from the thin ice which has formed over the snow and water to-day by the riverside. Here, then, I actually see the vapor rising through the ice.

Tuttle was saying to-day that he did re- member a certain man’s living with him once, from something that occurred. It was this: The man was about starting for Boston market for Tuttle, and Mrs. Tuttle had been telling him what to get for her. The man inquired if that was all, and Mrs. Tuttle said no, she wanted some nutmegs. “How many,” he asked. Tuttle, coming along just then, said, “Get a bushel.” When the man came home he said that he had had a good deal of trouble about the nutmegs. He could not find so many as were wanted, and, besides, they told him that they did not sell them by the bushel. But he said that he would take a bushel by the weight. Finally he made out to get a peck of them, which he brought home. It chanced that nutmegs were very high just then, so Tuttle, after selecting a few for his own use, brought the remainder up to town and succeeded in disposing of them at the stores for just what he gave for them. One man at the post-office said that a crow would drive a fox. He had seen three crows pursue a fox that was crossing the Great Meadows, and he fairly ran from [them] and took refuge in the woods. Farmer says that he remembers his father’s saying that as he stood in a field once, he saw a hawk soaring above and eying something on the ground. Looking round, he saw a weasel there eying the hawk. Just then the hawk stooped, and the weasel at the same instant sprang upon him, and up went the hawk with the weasel; but by and by the hawk began to come down as fast as he went up, rolling over and over, till he struck the ground. His father, going up, raised him up, when out hopped the weasel from under his wing and ran off none the worse for his fall. The surface of the snow, now that the sun has shone on it so long, is not so light and downy, almost impal- pable, as it was yesterday, but is somewhat flattened down and looks even as if [it] had had a skim-coat of some whitewash. I can see sparkles on it, but they are finer than at first and therefore less dazzling. The thin ice of the Mill Brook sides at the Turnpike bridge is sprinkled over with large crystals which look like asbestos or a coarse grain. This is no doubt the vapor of last evening crystallized. I see vapor rising from and curling along the open brook and also ris- ing from the end of a plank in the sun, which is wet with melted snow, though the thermometer was 16° only when I left the house. I see in low grounds numerous heads of bidens, with their seeds still. I see under some sizable white pines in E. Hubbard’s wood, where red squirrels have run about much since this snow. They have run chiefly, perhaps, under the surface of the snow, so that it is very much under- mined by their paths under these trees, and every now and then they have come to the surface, or the surface has fallen into their gallery. They seem to burrow under the snow about as readily as a meadow mouse. There are also paths raying out on every side from the base of the trees. And you see many holes through the snow into the ground where they now are, and other holes where they have probed for cones and nuts. The scales of the white pine cones are scattered about here and there. They seek a dry place to open them, —a fallen limb that rises above the snow, or often a lower dead stub projecting from the trunk of the tree.

About an inch more snow fell this morning. An average snow-storm is from six to eight inches deep on a level. The snow having ceased falling this forenoon, I go. to Holden Wood, Conantum, to look for tracks. It is too soon. I see none at all but those of a hound, and also where a partridge waded through the light snow, apparently while it was falling, making a deep gutter. Yesterday there was a broad field of bare ice on each side of the river, 2. e. on the meadows, and now, though it is covered with snow an inch deep, as I stand on the river or even on Fair ‘Haven Hill a quarter to half a mile off, I can see where the ice is through the snow, plainly, trace its whole outline, it being quite dark com- pared with where the snow has fallen on snow. In this case a mantle of light snow even an inch thick is not sufficient to conceal the darkness of the ice beneath it, where it is contrasted with snow on snow. Those little groves of sweet-fern still thickly leaved, whose tops now rise above the snow, are an interest- ing warm brown-red now, like the reddest oak leaves. Even this is an agreeable sight to the walker over snowy fields and hillsides. It has a wild and jagged leaf, alternately serrated. A warm reddish color revealed by the snow. . It is a mild day, and I notice, what I have not ob- served for some time, that blueness of the air only to be perceived in a mild day. I see it between me and woods half a mile distant. The softening of the air amounts to this. The mountains are quite invisible. You come forth to see this great blue presence lurking about the woods and the horizon.