5 April 1852 – 11 April 1852

Last night a snow-storm, and this morning we find the ground covered again six or eight inches deep —and drifted pretty badly beside. The con- ductor in the cars, which have been detained more than an hour, says it is a dry snow up-country. Here it is very damp.

'To-day I hear the croak of frogs in small pond-holes in the woods, and see dimples on the sur- face, which I suppose that they make, for when I ap- proach they are silent and the dimples are no longer seen. They are very shy. I notice the alder, the A. serrulata,’ in blossom, its reddish-brown catkins now lengthened and loose. What mean the apparently younger small red (catkins ?) ? ? I see a light, of fishermen, I suppose, spearing to- night on the river, though half the ground is covered with snow.

I frequently detect the Canadian in New England by his coarse. gray homespun capote, with a picturesque red sash round his waist, and his well- furred cap made to protect his ears and face against the severities of his winter.! Observe the Alnus incana, which is distinguished from the common by the whole branchlet hanging down, so that the sterile aments not only are but appear terminal, and by the brilliant polished reddish green of the bark, and by the leaves. The snow now disappearing, I observe the Mill Brook suddenly inclosed between two lines of green. Some kind of grass rises above the surface in deep ty water, like two faint lines of green drawn ? : : with a brush, betraying the sun’s chemistry. P Perhaps three days ago it was not. Answering ’ to the dotted lines. Went into the old Hunt house, which they said Uncle Abel said was built one hundred and fifty years ago. — The second story projects five or six inches over the first, the garret a foot over the second at the gables. There are two large rooms, one above the other, though the walls are low. The fireplace in the lower room rather large, with a high shelf of wood painted or stained to represent mahogany. ‘That whole side the room panelled. The main timbers about fifteen inches square, of pine or oak, and for the most part the frame a4 *1. <c. exposed. Where cased, in the best rooms, sixteen inches or more in width. The sills of the house appearing in the lower rooms all round the house, and cased, making a low shelf to put your feet on. No weather-boards on the corners outside ; the raw edges of the clapboards. The maple by the bridge in bloom.

8 a. Mm. — Down river to half a mile below Carlisle Bridge, the river being high, yet not high for the spring. Saw and heard the white-bellied swallows this morn- ing for the first time. Took boat at Stedman But- trick’s, a gunner’s boat, smelling of muskrats and pro- vided with slats for bushing the boat. Having got into the Great Meadows, after grounding once or twice on low spits of grass ground, we begin to see ducks which we have scared, flying low over the water, always with a striking parallelism in the direction of their flight. ‘They fly like regulars. They are like rolling-pins with wings. A few gulls, sailing like hawks, seen against the woods; crows; white-bellied swallows even here, already, which, I suppose, proves that their insect food is In the air. The water on our left, 2. e. the northwest, is now dark; on our right, has a silvery brightness on the summits of the waves, scarcely yellowish. Waves here do not break. Ducks most commonly seen flying by twos or threes. From Ball’s Hill the Great Meadow looks more light; perhaps it is the medium between the dark and light above mentioned. (Mem. Try this experiment again; i. €. look not toward nor from the sun but athwart this line.) Seen from this hill in this direction, there are, here and there, dark shadows spreading rapidly over the surface, where the wind strikes the water. The water toward the sun, seen from this height, shows not the broad silvery light but a myriad fine sparkles. The sky is full of light this morning, with different shades of blue, lighter below, darker above, separated perhaps by a thin strip of white vapor; thicker in the east. The first painted tortoise (Emys picta) at the bottom on the meadow. Look now toward Carlisle Bridge. See ahead the waves running higher in the middle of the meadow, and here they get the full sweep of the wind and they break into whitecaps; but we, yet in the — lee of the land, feel only the long smooth swells, as the day after a storm. It is pleasant, now that we are in the wind, to feel [stc] the chopping sound when the boat seems to fall upon the successive waves which it meets at right angles or in the eye of the wind. Why are some maples now in blossom so much redder than others? I have seen, then, the maples and the alders in blossom, but not yet the maple keys. From Carlisle Bridge we saw many ducks a quar- ter of a mile or more northward, black objects on the water, and heard them laugh something like a loon. Might have got near enough to shoot them. A fine sight to see them rise at last, about fifty of them, ap- parently black ducks. While they float on the water they appear to preserve constantly their relative dis- tance. Their note not exactly like that of a goose, yet resembling some domestic fowl’s cry, you know not what one; like a new species of goose. See very red cranberry vines now budded. The now brownish-red shrub growing everywhere in and about bogs (origi- nally green), with fine-dotted leaf, is probably the dwarf andromeda. * When we go ashore and ramble inland below Car- lisle Bridge, find here and there the freshly cut wood- piles which the choppers have not yet carted off, the ground strewn with chips. - A field lately cleared (last fall perhaps), with charred stumps, and grain now greening the sandy and uneven soil, reminds me agree- ably of a new country. Found a large bed of Arbutus Uva-Ursi with fruit in Carlisle half a mile below bridge. Some of the berries were turned black, as well as the berried stems and leaves next the ground at bottom of the thick beds, — an inky black. This vine red in the sunniest places. Never saw its fruit in this neigh- borhood before. As we ate our luncheon on the penin- sula off Carlisle shore, saw a large ring round the sun. The aspect of the sky varies every hour. About noon I observed it in the south, composed of short clouds horizontal and parallel to one another, each straight and ita — ~~ aN catan eel mae Se al resting on it, a lit- tle marsh-wise; again, in the north, I see a light but rather watery-looking flock of clouds; at mid-afternoon, slight wisps and thin veils of whitish clouds also. This meadow is about two miles long at one view from Car- lisle Bridge southward, appearing to wash the base of Pine Hill,? and it is about as much longer northward and from a third to a half a mile wide. We sailed this whole distance with two or three pitch pine boughs for a sail, though we made leeway the whole width of the meadow. If the bridge and its causeway were gone, there would not be so long a reach to my knowledge on this river. There is a large swamp on the east above the bridge, maples and birches in front, with pines in the rear, making a low, wild shore, the shore open- ing farther south to one or two solitary farmhouses; on the west, low hills covered with woods, but no house. The young trees and bushes, now making apparent islands on the meadows, are there nearly in this proportion, I should think; 7 e. in deep water, young maples, willows, button-bushes, red osier; where less water, alder, sweet-gale, and dwarf (?) andromeda, etc. \ We lay to in the lee of an island a little north of the bridge, where the surface is quite smooth, and the woods shelter us completely, while we hear the roar of the wind behind them, with an agreeable sense of protection, and see the white caps of the waves on either side. When there is a ripple merely in our calm port, we see the sunny reflections of the waves on the bottom, and the cranberries, etc. It is warm here in the sun, and the dog is drying his wet coat after so many voyages, and is drowsily nodding.

2.30 p. m. — To Second Division Brook. The ground is now for the most part bare, though I went through drifts three feet deep in some places. I hear that Simmonds had planted his potatoes (! !)