23 January 1860 – 29 January 1860

8 a. M. — On river. Walking on the ice by the side of the river this very pleasant morning, I see many minnows (may be dace) from one and a half to four inches long which have come out, through holes or cracks a foot wide more or less, where the current has worn through and shows the dark stream, and the water has flown over the adjacent ice, sinking it down so as to form a shallow water four or five feet wide or more, and often several rods long, and four or five inches deep on the side next. the crack, or deepest side. This water has a yellowish color, and a fish or anything else in it is at once seen. I think that they come out into this thin water over- lying the ice for the sake of the sun’s warmth. Much . heat must be reflected from the icy bottom this sunny * morning, —a sort of anticipation of spring to them. This shallow surface water is also thinly frozen over, and I can sometimes put my hand close over the minnow. When alarmed they make haste back to the dark water of the crack, and seek the depths again. Each pleasant morning like this all creatures recom- mence life with new resolutions, — even these minnows, methinks. That snow which in the afternoons these days is thawing and dead —in which you slump —is now hard and crisp, supporting your weight, and has a myriad brilliant sparkles in the sunlight. When a thaw comes, old tracks are enlarged in every direction, so that an ordinary man’s track will look hike the track of a snow-shoe, and a hound’s track will sometimes have spread to a foot in diameter (when there is a thin snow on ice), with all the toes distinct, looking like the track of a behemoth or me- . galonyx. Minott says that pigeons alight in great flocks on the tops of hemlocks in March, and he thinks they eat the seed. (But he also thought for the same reason that they ate the white pine seed at the same season, when it is not there! They might find a little of the last adhering to the pitch.) Says he used to shoot the gray squirrel thus: he put his hat or coat upon a stick while the squirrel hung behind an upright limb, then, going round to the side, he shot him, for the squirrel avoided exposing himself to the coat as much as to the man. He has stood on the steep hill southwest side of Moore’s Swamp and seen two foxes chase a white rabbit all about it. The rabbit would dodge them in the thicket, and now and then utter a loud cry of distress. The foxes would burst out on the meadow and then dash into the thicket again. This was when the wood had been cut and he could see plainly. He says that the white rabbit loves to sit concealed under the over- arching cinnamon ferns (which he calls “buck-horns”) on the sunny side of a swamp, or under a tuft of brakes which are partly fallen over. That a hound in its head- long course will frequently run over the fox, which quickly turns and gets off three or four rods before the former can stop himself.

2 p.m. — To Tarbell, river, via railroad. Thermometer 46. Sky thinly overcast, growing thicker at last as if it would rain. Wind northwest. See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder ') in Dennis Swamp by railroad. They are distinct enough from the gold- finch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast. They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse. The Assabet is open above Derby’s Bridge as far as I go or see, probably to the factory, and I know not how far below Derby’s. It opens up here sooner than below the Assabet Bath to its mouth. The blue vervain stands stiffly and abundant in one place, with much rather large brown seed in it. It is in good condition. Scare a shrike from an apple tree. He flies low over the meadow, somewhat like a woodpecker, and alights near the top twig of another apple tree. See a hawk sail over meadow and woods; not a hen-hawk; pos- sibly a marsh hawk. A grasshopper on the snow. The droppings of a skunk left on a rock, perhaps at the beginning of winter, were full of grasshoppers’ legs. As I stand at the south end of J. P. B.’s moraine, I watch six tree sparrows, which come from the wood and alight and feed on the ground, which is there bare. | They are only two or three rods from me, and are inces- santly picking and eating an abundance of the fine grass (short-cropped pasture grass) on that knoll, as a hen or goose does. I see the stubble an inch or two long in their bills, and how they stuff it down. Perhaps they select chiefly the green parts. So they vary their fare and there is no danger of their starving. These six hopped round for five minutes over a space a rod square before I put them to flight, and then I noticed, in a space only some four feet square in that rod, at least eigh- teen droppings (white at one end, the rest more slate- colored). So wonderfully active are they in their move- ments, both external and internal. They do not suffer for want of a good digestion, surely. No doubt they eat some earth or gravel too. So do partridges eat a great deal. ‘These birds, though they have bright brown and buff backs, hop about amid the little inequalities of the pasture almost unnoticed, such is their color and so humble are they. Solomon thus describes the return of Spring (Song of Solomon, ii, 10-12): — “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of, the turtle is heard in our land.”’

In keeping a journal of one’s walks and thoughts it seems to be worth the while to record those phenomena which are most interesting to us at the time. Such is the weather. It makes a material differ- ence whether it is foul or fair, affecting surely our mood and thoughts. Then there are various degrees and kinds of foulness and fairness. It may be cloudless, or there may be sailing clouds which threaten no storm, or it may be partially overcast. On the other hand it may rain, or snow, or hail, with various degrees of intensity. It may be a transient thunder-storm, or a shower, or a flurry of snow, or it may be a prolonged ~ storm of rain or snow. Or the sky may be overcast or rain-threatening. So with regard to temperature. It may be warm or cold. Above 40° is warm for winter. One day, at 38 even, I walk dry and it is good sleigh- ing; the next day it may have risen to 48, and the snow is rapidly changed to slosh. It may be calm or windy. The finest winter day is a cold but clear and glittering one. ‘There is a remarkable life in the air then, and birds and other creatures appear to feel it, to be excited and invigorated by it. Also warm and melting days in winter are inspiring, though less char- acteristic. I will call the weather fair, if it does not threaten rain or snow or hail; foul, if it rains or snows or hails, or is so overcast that we expect one or the other from hour to hour. To-day it is fair, though the sky is slightly overcast, but there are sailing clouds in the south- west. The river is considerably broken up by the recent thaw and rain, but the Assabet much the most, prob- ably because it is swifter and, owing to mills, more fluctuating. When the river begins to break up, it becomes clouded like a mackerel sky, but in this case the blue portions are where the current, clearing away the ice beneath, begins to show dark. The current of the water, striking the ice, breaks it up at last into portions of the same form with those which the wind gives to vapor. First, all those open places which I measured lately much en- large themselves each way. Saw A. Hosmer approaching in his pung. He cal- culated so that we should meet just when he reached the bare planking of the causeway bridge, so that his horse might as it were stop of his own accord and no other excuse would be needed for a talk. He says that he has seen that little bird (evidently the shrike) with mice in its claws. Wonders what has got all the rabbits this winter. Last winter there were hundreds near his house; this winter he sees none.

Fair, but overcast. Thermometer about 32°. Pretty good skating on the Great Meadows, slightly raised and smoothed by the thaw and also the rain of (I think) the 23d-24th. Great revolutions of this sort take place before you are aware of it. Though you walk every day, you do not foresee the kind of walking you will have the next day. Skating, crusted snow, slosh, etc., are wont to take you by surprise. P. M.— To Eleazer Davis’s Hill, and made a fire on the ice, merely to see the flame and smell the smoke. We soon had a slender flame flashing upward some four feet, — so many parallel undulating tongues. The air above and about it was all in commotion, being heated so that we could not see the landscape distinctly or steadily through it. If only to see the pearl ashes and . hear the brands sigh.

2 p.m.— Up river to Fair Haven Pond, and return by Walden. Half a dozen redpolls busily picking the seeds out of the larch cones behind Monroe’s. They are pretty ~ tame, and I stand near. They perch on the slender twigs which are beaded with cones, and swing and teeter there while they perseveringly peck at them, trying now this one, now that, and sometimes appearing to pick out and swallow them quite fast. I notice no red- ness or carmine at first, but when the top of one’s head comes between me and the sun it unexpectedly glows. Fair and hardly a cloud to be seen. Thermometer 28. (But it is overcast from the northwest before sun- set. ) After the January thaw we have more or less of crusted snow, 7. e. more consolidated and crispy. When the thermometer is not above 32 this snow for the most part bears, —if not too deep. | Now I see, as I am on the ice by Hubbard’s meadow, some wisps of vapor in the west and southwest advan- cing. They are of a fine, white, thready grain, curved — <S \ like skates at the end. Have we not more finely di- vided clouds in winter than in summer? flame-shaped, asbestos-like ? I doubt if the clouds show as fine a grain in warm weather. They are wrung dry now. ‘They are not expanded but contracted, like spicule. What hieroglyphics in the winter sky! Those wisps in the west advanced and increased like white flames with curving tongues, — like an aurora by day. Now I see a few hard and distinct ripple-marks at right angles with them, or parallel with the horizon, the a LO a name” Tessa —— en eg ee lines indicating the ridges of the ripple-marks. These are like the abdominal plates of a snake. This occupies only a very small space in the sky. Looking right up overhead, I see some gauzy cloud-stuff there, so thin as to be grayish, — brain-like, finely reticulated; so thin yet so firmly drawn, membranous. These, methinks, are always seen overhead only. Now, underneath the flamy asbestos part, I detect an almost imperceptible rippling in a thin lower vapor, — an incipient mackerel- ling (in form). Now, nearly to the zenith, I see, not a mackerel sky, but blue and thin, blue-white, finely mixed, like fleece finely picked and even strewn over a blue ground. The white is in small roundish flocks. In a mackerel sky there is a parallelism of oblongish scales. ‘This is so remote as to appear stationary, while a lower vapor is rapidly moving eastward. Such clouds as the above are the very thin advance- guard of the cloud behind. It soon comes on more densely from the northwest, and darkens all. No bright sunset to-night. What fine and pure reds we see in the sunset sky! Yet earth is not ransacked for dye-stuffs. It is all accomplished by the sunlight on vapor at the right angle, and the sunset sky is constant if you are at the ™ right angle. The sunset sky is sometimes more north- erly, sometimes more southerly. I saw one the other day occupying only the south horizon, but very fine, and reaching more than half-way to the zenith from west to east. This may either be for want of clouds or from excess of them on certain sides. As I go along the edge of Hubbard’s Wood, on the ice, it is very warm in the sun — and calm there. There are certain spots I could name, by hill and wood sides, which are always thus sunny and warm in fair weather, and have been, for aught I know, since the world was made. What a distinction they enjoy! How many memorable localities in a river walk! Here is the warm wood-side; next, the good fishing bay; and next, where the old settler was drowned when crossing on the ice a hundred years ago. It 1s all storied. I occasionally hear a musquash plunge under the ice next the shore. These winter days I occasionally hear the note of a goldfinch, or maybe a redpoll, unseen, passing high overhead. When you think that your walk is profitless and a fail- ure, and you can hardly persuade yourself not to return, it is on the point of being a success, for then you are in that subdued and knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open.

Colder than before, and not a cloud in the sky to-day. P. M.—To Fair Haven Pond and return via An- dromeda Ponds and railroad.