7 February 1853 – 13 February 1853

'The warm rains have melted off the surface snow or white ice on Walden, down to the dark ice, the color of the water, only three or four inches thick; but I observe that still, for a rod or more in width around the shores, the ice is white as snow and appar- ently thicker, probably owing to the reflection from the bottom from the first filling it with air-bubbles.!

At Cambridge to-day. Dr. Harris thinks the Indians had no real hemp but their apocynum, and, he thinks, a kind of nettle, and an asclepias, etc. He doubts if the dog was indigenous among them. Finds nothing to convince him in the history of New England.’ Thinks that the potato which is said to have been carried from Virginia by Raleigh was the ground-nut (which is described, I per- ceived, in Debry (Heriot?) among the fruits of Vir- ginia), the potato not being indigenous in North Amer- ica, and the ground-nut having been called wild potato in New England, the north part of Virginia, and not being found in England. Yet he allows that Raleigh cultivated the potato in Ireland. Saw the grizzly bear near the Haymarket to-day, said (?) to weigh nineteen hundred, — apparently too much. He looked four feet and a few inches in height, by as much in length, not including his great head, and his tail, which was invisible. He looked gentle, and continually sucked his claws and cleaned between them with his tongue. Small eyes and funny little ears; per- fectly bearish, with a strong wild-beast scent; fed on Indian meal and water. Hind paws a foot long. Ly- ing down, with his feet up against the bars; often sit- ting up in the corner on his hind quarters.

Friday. While surveying for J. Moore to- day, saw a large wood tortoise stirring in the Mill Brook, and several bodies of frogs ! without their hind legs. But Sunday it snowed about a foot deep, — our second, only, important snow this winter,—and now the brook is not only frozen over, but almost completely concealed under drifts, and that reminiscence or pro- phecy of spring is also buried up. While surveying on the Hunt farm the other day, behind Simon Brown’s house I heard a remarkable echo. In the course of surveying, being obliged to call aloud to my assistant from every side and almost every part of a farm in succession, and at various hours of a day, I am pretty sure to discover an echo if any exists, and the other day it was encouraging and soothing to hear it. After so many days of comparatively insigni- ficant drudgery with stupid companions, this leisure, this sportiveness, this generosity in nature, sympathiz- ing with the better part of me; somebody I could talk with, — one degree, at least, better than talking with one’s self. Ah! Simon Brown’s premises harbor a hired man and a hired maid he wots not of. Some voice of somebody I pined to hear, with whom I could form a community. I did wish, rather, to linger there and call all day to the air and hear my words repeated, but a vulgar necessity dragged me along round the bounds of the farm, to hear only the stale answers of my chain-man shouted back to me. I am surprised that we make no more ado about echoes. They are almost the only kindred voices that I hear. I wonder that the traveller does not oftener remark upon a remarkable echo, —he who observes Rana palustris, Channing saw some entire. so many things. There needs some actual doubleness like this in nature, for if the voices which we com- monly hear were all that we ever heard, what then? Has it to do with the season of the year? I have since heard an echo on Moore’s farm. It was the memorable event of the day, that echo I heard, not anything my companions said, or the travel- lers whom I met, or my thoughts, for they were all mere repetitions or echoes in the worst sense of what I had heard and thought before many times; but this echo was accompanied with novelty, and by its repe- tition of my voice it did more than double that. It was a profounder Socratic method of suggesting thoughts unutterable to me the speaker. There was one I heartily loved to talk with. Under such favorable auspices I could converse with myself, could reflect; the hour, the atmosphere, and the conformation of the ground permitted it.

In the midst of the snow-storm on Sunday (to-day), I was called to window to see a dense flock of snowbirds on and under the pigweed in the garden.’ It was so in the other storm. It is to be remarked that I have not observed them in the garden at any other time this winter. ‘They come with the storm, the falling and driving snow. I suspect they were my chestnut- fronted ones.?