9 February 1852 – 15 February 1852

1 am interested to see the seeds of the poke, about a dozen, shiny black with a white spot, some- what like a saba bean in shape. The still full granary of the birds. At 9 a. M. up river to Fair Haven Pond. This is our month of the crusted snow. Was this the Indians’? I get over the half-buried fences at a stride, and the drifts slope up to the tops of the walls on each side. The crust is melted on the south slopes and lets me in, or where the sun has been reflected (yes- terday) from a wood-side and rotted it, but the least inclination to the north is evidence of a hard surface. On the meadows and in level open fields away from the reflection of pines and oak leaves, it will generally bear. Met Sudbury Haines on the river before the Cliffs, come a-fishing. Wearing an old coat, much patched, with many colors. He represents the Indian still. The very patches in his coat and his improvident life do so. I feel that he is as essential a part, nevertheless, of our community as the lawyer in the village. He tells me that he caught three pickerel here the other day that weighed seven pounds all together. It is the old story. The fisherman is a natural story-teller. No man’s imagination plays more pranks than his, while he is tending his reels and trotting from one to another, or watching his cork in summer. He is ever waiting for the sky to fall. He has sent out a venture. He has a ticket in the lottery of fate, and who knows what it may draw? He ever expects to catch a bigger fish yet. He is the most patient and believing of men. Who else will stand so long in wet places? When the haymaker runs to shelter, he takes down his pole and bends his steps to the river, glad to have a leisure day. He is more like an inhabitant of nature. The weather con- cerns him. He is an observer of her phenomena. They say that the Pasha, by some improvements in cutting down trees, has banished rain from Egypt al- together for some years past. Men tell about the mirage to be seen in certain deserts and in peculiar states of the atmosphere. The mirage is constant. ‘The state of the atmosphere is continually varying, and, to a keen observer, objects do not twice present exactly the same appearance. If I invert my head this morning and look at the woods in the hori- zon, they do not look so far off and elysian-like as in the afternoon. If I am not mistaken, it is late in the afternoon that the atmosphere is in such a state that we derive the most pleasure from and are most surprised by this experiment. ‘The prospect is thus actually a constantly varying mirage, answering to the condition of our perceptive faculties and our fluctuating imagina- tions. If we incline our heads never so little, the most familiar things begin to put on some new aspect. If we invert our heads completely our desecrated wood-lot appears far off, incredible, elysian, unprofaned by us. As you cannot swear through glass, no more can you swear through air, the thinnest section of it. It paints and glasses everything. When was not the air as elas- tic as our spirits? I cannot well conceive of greater variety than it produces by its changes from hour to hour of every day. It is a new glass placed over the picture every hour. I did not know that the world was suffering for want of gold. The discovery of a mountain of gold would only derange the currency. I have seen a little of it. I know it is very malleable, but not so malleable as wit. A grain of it will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom. I do not care if the gold- smiths and jewellers find these hard times.' A man goes to the end of his garden, inverts his head, and does not know his own cottage. The novelty is in us, and it is also in nature. When I break off a twig of green-barked sassafras, as I am going through the woods now, and smell it, I am startled to find it fragrant as in summer. It is an importation of all the spices of Oriental summers into our New England winter. Very foreign to the snow and the oak leaves. I find that the wood on the Island in Fair Haven Pond has been cut off this winter, but as the young [wood] and underwood is left, I am sur- prised to see so much witch-hazel there,— more than anywhere else that I know > (ro. Mf Tt shallube called vies = oR, Hazel Island. The spray of Keve ZS 4 this shrub is remarkably re- curved in some instances; on one whole side of a large bush. For the first time this many a year, I tasted there some of the sweet froth which had issued from the sap of a walnut or hickory lately cut. It is always cheer- ing and somewhat unexpected to meet in nature with anything so agreeable to the human palate. So inno- cent a sweet. It reminded me of the days when I used to scrape this juice off the logs in my father’s wood-pile. Respecting lichens, perhaps the first question which the mass of men put is, “ What ones are good to eat ?” And the meagre answer is rock-tripe (Umbilicaria) and Iceland moss (Cetraria Islandica). They may next in- quire which are the most beautiful. The most scientific will only assist to answer similar questions. How they concern man, — the most elaborate and driest system must tell us better at last how they concern man.

Now if there are any who think that I am vainglorious, that I set myself up above others and crow over their low estate, let-me tell them that I could tell a pitiful story respecting myself as well as them, if my spirits held out to doit; I could encourage them with a sufficient list of failures, and could flow as humbly as the very gutters themselves; I could enumerate a list of as rank offenses as ever reached the nostrils of heaven; that I think worse of myself than they can possibly think of me, being better acquainted with the man. I put the best face on the matter. I will tell them this secret, if they will not tell it to anybody else. Write while the heat is in you. When the farmer burns a hole in his yoke, he carries the hot iron quickly from the fire to the wood, for every moment it is less effectual to penetrate (pierce) it. It must be used in- stantly, or it is useless. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience. We have none of those peculiar clear, vitreous, crys- talline vistas in the western sky before sundown of late. There is perchance more moisture in the air. Perhaps that phenomenon does not belong to this part of the winter. : I saw yesterday on the snow on the ice, on the south side of Fair Haven Pond, some hundreds of honey-bees, dead and sunk half an inch below the crust. They had evidently come forth from their hive (perhaps in a large hemlock on the bank close by), and had fallen on the snow chilled to death. Their bodies extended from the tree to about three rods from it toward the pond. Pratt says he would advise me to remove the dead bees, lest somebody else should be led to discover their retreat, and I may get five dollars for the swarm, and perhaps a good deal of honey.

Wednesday. When the thermometer is down to 20° in the morning, as last month, I think of the poor dogs who have no masters. If a poor dog has no master, everybody will throw a billet of wood at him. It never rains but it pours. It now rains, —a drizzling rain mixed with mist, which ever and anon fills the air to the height of-fifteen or twenty feet. It makes what they call an old-fashioned mill privilege in the streets, 2. e. I suppose, a privilege on a small stream good only for a part of the year. Perhaps the best evidence of an amelioration of the climate — at least that the snows are less deep than formerly — is the snow-shoes which still lie about in so many garrets, now useless, though the population of this town has not essentially increased for seventy-five years past, and the travelling within the limits of the town accordingly not much facilitated. .No man ever uses them now, yet the old men used them in their youth. I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably can tell me nothing to the purpose. There is life, an experiment untried by me, and it does not avail me that you have tried it. If I have any valuable experience, I am sure to reflect that this my mentors said nothing about. What were mysteries to the child remain mysteries to the old man.' It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where railroads and steamboats, the printing-press and the church, and the usual evidences of what is called civil- ization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants cannot be as degraded as that of savages. Savages have their high and their low estate, and so have civilized nations. To know this I should not need to look further than to the shanties which everywhere line our railroads, that last improvement in civilization. But I will refer you to Ireland, which is marked as one of the white or enlightened spots on the map. Yet I have no doubt that that nation’s rulers are as wise as the average of civilized rulers.’

Talking with Rice this afternoon about the bees which I discovered the other day, he told me something about his bee-hunting. He and Pratt .go out together once or twice a year. He takes a little tin box with a little refined sugar and water about the con- sistency of honey, or some honey in the comb, which comes up so high only in the box as to let the lid clear a bee’s back, also some little bottles of paint — red, blue, white, etc. — and a compass properly prepared to line the bees with, the sights perhaps a foot apart. Then they ride off (this is in the fall) to some exten- sive wood, perhaps the west side of Sudbury. They go to some buckwheat-field or a particular species of late goldenrod which especially the bees frequent at that season, and they are sure to find honey-bees enough. They catch one by putting the box under the blos- soms and then covering him with the lid, at the same time cutting off the stalk of the flower. ‘They then set down the box, and after a while raise the lid slightly to see if the bee is feeding; if so, they take off the lid, knowing that he will not fly away till he gets ready, and catch another; and so on till they get a sufficient num- ber. Then they thrust sticks into their little paint-bot- tles, and, with these, watching their opportunity, they give the bees each a spot of a particular color on his body, —they spot him distinctly, — and then, lying about a rod off, not to scare them, and watching them carefully all the while, they wait till one has filled his‘ sac, and prepares to depart to his hive. They are careful to note whether he has a red or a blue jacket or what color. He rises up about ten feet and then begins to circle rapidly round and round with a hum, sometimes a circle twenty feet in diameter before he has decided which way to steer, and then suddenly shoots off in a bee-line to his hive. The hunters lie flat on their backs and watch him carefully all the while. If blue-jacket steers toward the open land where there are known to be hives, they forthwith leave out of the box all the blue- jackets, and move off a little and open the box in a new place to get rid of that family. And so they work till they come to a bee, red-jacket perhaps, that steers into the wood or swamp or in a direction to suit them. They take the point of compass exactly, and wait per- haps till red-jacket comes back, that they may ascer- tain his course more exactly, and also judge by the time it has taken for him to go and return, using their watches, how far off the nest is, though sometimes they are disappointed in their calculations, for it may take the [bee] more or less time to crawl into its nest, depending on its position in the tree. By the third journey he will commonly bring some of his compan- ions. Our hunters then move forward a piece, from time to time letting out a bee to make sure of their course. After the bees have gone and come once, they generally steer straight to their nest at once without circling round first. Sometimes the hunters, having observed this course carefully on the compass, go round a quar- ter of a circle and, letting out another bee, observe the course from that point, knowing that where these two lines intersect must be the nest. Rice thinks that a bee- line does not vary more than fifteen or twenty feet from a straight one in going half a mile. They frequently trace the bees thus to their hives more than a mile. - He said that the last time he went out the wind was so strong that the bees made some leeway just as a bullet will, and he could not get the exact course to their hives. He has a hive of bees over in Sudbury, and he every year sows some buckwheat for them. He has visited this buckwheat when in blossom when there was more than one bee to every six inches square, and out of curiosity has caught a number of the bees and, letting them out successively, has calculated by the several courses they took whose hives they came from in almost every instance, though some had come more than two miles and others belonged to his own hive close by. He has seen a dozen hogsheads of honey from South America on the wharf at Boston. Says they manu- facture honey now from maple syrup, which you can- not tell from bee honey, taking care to throw some dead bees and bees’ wings and a little honeycomb into it. He was repaid if he found the, nest, even if he did not get any honey. I am glad to know that there are such grown children left. He says the mountain honey- suckle (columbine) has a good deal of honey at the bottom of the flower which the bee cannot get at in the usual way; it therefore gnaws a hole in it from the out- side. The actual bee-hunter and pigeon-catcher is familiar with facts in the natural history of bees and pigeons which Huber and even Audubon are totally ignorant of. I love best the unscientific man’s knowledge; there is so much more humanity in it. It is connected with true sports. 9 a. M.— To Conantum. The rain has diminished the snow and hardened the crust, and made bare ground in many places. A yellow water, a foot or two deep, covers the ice on the meadows, but is not frozen quite hard enough to bear. As the river swells, the ice cracks along both sides over the edge of its channel, often defined by willows, and that part over the river rises with the water, but that over the meadow is held down apparently by the grass and bushes (and moreover feels the force of the freshet less), and is, accordingly, covered with water.

But this points to a distinction between the civilized man and the savage; and, no doubt, they have designs on us in making (of the life of a civilized people) an institution in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed, in order, perchance, to preserve and perfect the race. But I wish to show at what a sacrifice this advantage is at present obtained, and to suggest that we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvan- tage. What mean ye by saying that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge? “As I live, saith the Lord God, ye shall not have occasion any more to use this proverb in Israel. “Behold, all souls are mine; as the soul of the father, so also the soul of the son is mine: the soul that sinneth, it shall die.” ? 3 p. mM. — Walden road to pond, thence to Cliffs. The slight snow of last night, lodging on the limbs of the oaks, has given them the wintry and cobwebbed appearance which distinguishes them so plainly from the pines. They are great cladonias, perchance. Met Joshua Brown returning from the pond (Walden) without having caught a fish. Has had no luck there this winter, he thinks because of the woodcutters’ fal]- ing trees on to the ice. He, too, tells how many weighed a certain number of pounds. Four pounds and three quarters is the heaviest he ever caught, but the pickerel that ran off with his reel (before he got to it), which he did not see, he set at ten pounds. I noticed a white pine, rotten within, near the pond, — or, rather, eaten out, honeycombed, by the ants, as I think, — and I was struck by the regular cellular character of the cavities they had made, separated by thin partitions, each cell about an inch and a half long, reminding me of Chinese puzzles carved in wood. The seeds or seed-vessels of wintergreen are con- spicuous above the snow. The winter has had its seasons somewhat in this order, as near as I now remember: First there were a few glowing sunsets after raw and blustering days, setting the pines and oaks on fire with their blaze, when the summer and fall had set, —the afterglow of the year. Then, if I remember, came the snows, and true winter began, the snow growing gradually deeper and the cold more intense. I think it was before the first thaw, which this winter came before the end of December, that the main attraction in my afternoon walks (at any rate when the days were shortest and the cold most intense) was the western sky at and be- fore sunset, when, through the vistas there between the clouds, you saw a singularly crystalline, vitreous sky, which perhaps is not seen at any other season of the year, at least not in such perfection. I will see if we have any more this winter. Well, then there was the thaw, January thaw, which this year came in De- cember, for it is the first thaw after long-continued cold weather and snow, when we have fairly forgotten summer. ‘'his winter was remarkable for the long continuance of severe cold weather after it had once setin. Latterly we have had, 7. e. within a week, crusted snow, made by thaw and rain, but now I do not see the crystalline sky. In the January thaw I should have mentioned the sand foliage in the Cut.: Now we have the swollen river, and yellow water over the meadow ice to some extent. Other epochs I might find described in my Journal. At the Cliffs, the rocks are in some places covered with ice; and the least inclination beyond a perpen- dicular in their faces is betrayed by the formation of icicles at once, which hang perpendicularly, like organ pipes, in front of the rock. They are now conducting downward the melting ice and snow, which drips from their points with a slight clinking and lJapsing sound, but when the sun has set will freeze there and add to the icicles’ length. Where the icicles have reached the ground and are like thick pillars, they have a sort of annular appearance, somewhat like the successive swells on the legs of tables and on bed-posts. There is perhaps a harmony between the turner’s taste and the law of nature in this instance. The shadow of the water flowing or pulsating behind this transparent icy crust or these stalactites in the sun imparts a semblance of life to the whole. The traveller's is so apt to be a progress more or less rapid toward his home (I have read many a voy- age round the world more than half of which, certainly, was taken up with the return voyage; he no sooner is out of sight of his native hills than he begins to tell us how he got home again) that I wonder he = not stay at home in the first place. The laws of nature always furnish us with the best excuse for going and coming. If we do not go now, we shall find our fire out. I hate that my motive for visiting a friend should be that I want society; that it should lie in my poverty and weakness, and not in his and my riches and strength. His friendship should make me strong enough to do without him.

Perhaps I am descended from that North- man named “'Thorer the Dog-footed.”’” Thorer Hund — “he was the most powerful man in the North” — to judge from his name belonged to the same family. Thorer is one of the most, if not the most, common name in the chronicles of the Northmen.