30 January 1860 – 5 February 1860

2 p. Ms— To Nut Meadow and White Pond road. Thermometer 45°. Fair with a few cumuli of indefi- nite outline in the north and south, and dusky under . sides. A gentle west wind and a blue haze. ‘Thaws. The river has opened to an unusual extent, owing to the very long warm spell, — almost all this month. Even from Hubbard’s Bridge up and down it is break- ing up, is all mackerelled, with lunar-shaped openings and some like a thick bow. rn They [are] from one to twelve feet long. Yesterday’s slight snow is all gone, leaving the ice, old snow, and bare ground; and as I walk up the river- side, there is a brilliant sheen from the wet ice toward the sun, instead of the crystalline rainbow of yesterday. Think of that (of yesterday), to have constantly before you, receding as fast as you advance, a bow formed of a myriad crystalline mirrors on the surface of the snow!! What miracles, what beauty surrounds us! Then, another day, to do all your walking knee- deep in perfect six-rayed crystals of surpassing beauty but of ephemeral duration, which have fallen from the sky. The ice has so melted on the meadows that I see where the musquash has left his clamshells in a heap near the riverside, where there was a hollow in the bank. The small water-bugs are gyrating abundantly in Nut Meadow Brook. It is pleasant also to see the very distinct npple-marks in the sand at its bottom, of late so rare a sight. I go through the piny field northwest of M. Miles’s. There are no more beautiful natural parks than these pastures in which the white pines have sprung up spontaneously, standing at handsome intervals, where the wind chanced to let the seed lie at last, and the grass and blackberry vines have not yet been killed by them. There are certain sounds invariably heard in warm ~ and thawing days in winter, such as the crowing of cocks, the cawing of crows, and sometimes the gobbling of turkeys. The crow, flying high, touches the tym- panum of the sky for us, and reveals the tone of it. What does it avail to look at a thermometer or barome- ter compared with listening to his note? He informs me that Nature is in the tenderest mood possible, and I hear the very flutterings of her heart. Crows have singular wild and suspicious ways. You will [see] a couple flying high, as if about their business, but lo, they turn and circle and caw over your head again and again for a mile; and this is their business, —asif a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away. This even in winter, when they have no nests to be anxious about. But it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat (as at F. Wheeler’s wood) which the choppers are laying low. I saw the other day (apparently) mouse(?)-tracks which had been made in slosh <—# 4.22 tuts on the Andromeda Ponds and °° (™~ow—~w ee then frozen, — little gutters about two inches wide and nearly one deep, looking very artificial with the nicks on the sides.

2 p.mM.— To Bedford Level. Thermometer 45. Fair but all overcast. Sun’s place quite visible. Wind southwest. Went to what we called Two-Boulder Hill, behind the house where I was born. There the wind suddenly changed round 90° to northwest, and it became quite cold (had fallen to 24° or 24° [sic] at 5.30). Called a field on the east slope Crockery Field, there were so many bits in it. Saw a pitch pine on a rock about four feet high, but two limbs flat on the ground. This spread much and had more than a hundred cones of different ages on it. Such are always the most fertile. Can look a great way northeast along the Bedford Swamp. Saw a large hawk, probably hen-hawk. The ice that has been rotting and thawing from time to time on the meadows — the water run out from below — has many curious marks on it. There are many ingrained waving lines more or less parallel. Often they make Sa circular figures, or oval, and are concentric, as if they marked the edge of a great bubble or the like. 7 I notice the ice on a ditched brook so far worn by the current as to be mackerelled in color, white and dark, all along the middle, making a figure two or three rods long which reminds me forcibly of the flat skin of a boa-constrictor, — marked just like it.

2 p.m. — 5°. A cold day. Two or three inches of dry snow last night. Grows colder apace toward night. Frost forms on windows.

6° below at about 8 a. M. Clock has stopped. Teams squeak. 2 p.M. — To Fair Haven Pond: The river, which was breaking up, is frozen over again. The new ice over the channel is of a yellow tinge, and is covered with handsome rosettes two or three inches in diameter where the vapor which rose through froze and crystallized. This new ice for forty rods together is thickly covered with these rosettes, often as thick as snow, an inch deep, and sometimes in ridges like frozen froth three inches high. Sometimes they are in a straight line along a crack. The frozen breath of the river at a myriad breathing-holes. ~ A thaw began the 7th of January, and it was mild and thawing most of the time for the rest of that month; but with February we have genuine winter again. Almost all the openings in the river are closed again, and the new ice is covered with rosettes. It blowed considerably yesterday, though it is very still to-day, and the light, dry snow, especially on the meadow ice and the river, was remarkably plowed and drifted by it, and now presents a very wild and arctic scene. Indeed, no part of our scenery is ever more arctic than the river and its meadows now, though the snow was only some three inches deep on a level. It is cold and perfectly still, and you walk over a level snowy tract. It is a sea of white waves of nearly uniform shape and size. Each drift is a low, sharp promontory di- rected toward the northwest, and showing which way the wind blowed eT with occasional ’ SD ewer. =e small patches of SF bare ice amid them. It is exactly as if you walked over a solid sea where the waves rose about two feet high. These promontories have a general resemblance to one another. Many of them are perfect tongues of snow more or less curving and sharp. —— ee a Gorn orn Go tee Commonly the wind has made a little hollow in the snow directly behind this tongue, it may be to the ice, spoon-shaped or like a tray, —if small, a cradle in the snow. Again it is a complete canoe, the tongue being its bows.

3 p.m. — 'To Gowing’s Swamp. I accurately pace the swamp in two directions and ~ find it to be shaped thus: — Gowing'’s Swamp. (Scale of forty paces to an inch) When I read some of the rules for speaking and writing the English language correctly, — as that a sentence must never end with a particle, — and per- ceive how implicitly even the learned obey it, I think — Any fool can make a rule And every fool will mind it.

p.M.— Up Assabet. 2 p.M., 40°. I see where crows have pecked the tufts of cladonia lichens which peep out of the snow, pulling them to pieces, no doubt looking for worms. Also have eaten the frozen-thawed apples under the trees, tracking all the ground over there. February Ist, though so cold and the snow so dry, as it blowed pretty hard, was a day of drift behind northerly walls, and when those shell-like drifts were formed, as well as the wild drifts of Hubbard’s meadow described on the 3d. I see at the Assabet stone bridge where, apparently, one or two otters travelled about on the ice last night in the thin snow. The river is open eight or ten rods there, and I noticed their tracks all about the river and close to the edge of the ice, thin as it was, for a dozen rods above and below the bridge. At first, being at a distance, I thought them dog-tracks, but I might have known that no dogs would ever have run about so there, on that thin ice and so near the edge of it. ey ,. They were generally like this, each four be- 0 ing from fifteen to twenty-four inches apart. 0 {) Occasionally the track was somewhat like a rabbit’s. I saw where one had apparently dragged himself along the ice. They had en- tered the water in many places, also travelled along under the slanting ice next the bank long 6) Q distances. They were evidently attracted by U 4 that open water. ‘There was no distinct sliding place. =~ Coming home last night in the twilight, I recognized a neighbor a dozen rods off by his walk or carriage, though it was so dark that I could not see a single fea- ture of his person. Indeed, his person was all covered up excepting his face and hands, and I could not possibly have distinguished these at this distance from another man’s. Nor was it owing to any peculiarity in his dress, for I should have known him though he had had on a perfectly new suit. It was because the man within the clothes moved them in a peculiar man- ner that I knew him thus at once at a distance and in the twilight. He made a certain figure in any clothes he might wear, and moved in it in a peculiar manner. Indeed, we have a very intimate knowledge of one another; we see through thick and thin; spirit meets spirit. A man hangs out innumerable signs by which we may know him. So, last summer, I knew another neighbor half a mile off up the river, though I did not see him, by the manner in which the breath from his lungs and mouth, i.e. his voice, made the air strike my ear. In that manner he communicated himself to all his acquaintance within a diameter of one mile (if it were all up and down the river). So I remember to have been sure once in a very dark night who was preceding me on the sidewalk, — though I could not see him, —by the sound of his tread. I was surprised to find that I knew it. And to-day, seeing a peculiar very long track of a man in the snow, who has been along up the river this morning, I guessed that it was George Melvin, because it was accompanied .by a hound’s track. There was a thin snow on the ice, and I observed that he not only furrowed the snow for a foot before he completed his step, but that the (toe) of his track was always indefinite, as if his boot had been worn out and prolonged at the toe. I noticed that I and my companion made a clear and distinct track at the toe, but when I experi- mented, and tried to make a track like this by not lifting my feet but gliding and partly scuffing along, I found myself walking just like Melvin, and that per- fectly convinced me that it was he.’ We have no occasion to wonder at the instinct of a dog. In these last two instances I surpassed the instinct of the dog. It may always be a question how much or how little of a man goes to any particular act. It is not merely by taking time and by a conscious effort that he betrays himself. A man is revealed, and a man is concealed, in a myriad unexpected ways; e. g., I can hardly think of a more effectual way of disguising neighbors to one another than by stripping them naked.