12 November 1855 – 18 November 1855

In mid-forenoon (10.45), seventy or eighty geese, in three harrows successively smaller, flying southwest — pretty well west— over the house. A completely overcast, occasionally drizzling forenoon. I at once heard their clangor and rushed to and opened the window. The three harrows were gradually formed into one great one before they were out of sight, the geese shifting their places without slacking their pro- gress. P. M. — To Cardinal Shore. Going over Swamp Bridge Brook at 3 p. m., I saw in the pond by the roadside, a few rods before me, the sun shining bright, a mink swimming, the whole length of his back out. It was a rich brown fur, glow- ing internally as the sun fell on it, ike some ladies’ boas, not black, as it sometimes appears, especially on ice. It landed within three rods, showing its long, some- what cat-like neck, and I observed was carrying some- thing by its mouth, dragging it overland. At first I thought it a fish, maybe an eel, and when it had got half a dozen feet, I ran forward, and it dropped its prey and went into the wall. It was a muskrat, the head and part of the fore legs torn off and gone, but the rest still fresh and quite heavy, including hind legs and tail. It had probably killed this muskrat in the brook, eaten so much, and was dragging the remainder to its retreat in the wall. A fine clear afternoon after the misty morning and heavy rain of the night. Even after all this rain I see the streaming lines of gossamer from trees and fences. From Fair Haven Hill the air is clear and fine-grained, and now it is a perfect russet November landscape, — including the reddish brown of the oaks, excepting where the winter-rye fields and some low meadows show their green, the former quite bright, and also the evergreen patches of pines, edged in the northwest by the blue mountain ridges. Got the wood thrush’s (?) nest of November 5th. It is about five inches [in] diameter from outside to outside, and two and a half within. Outside of some weedy tufts (beneath), weed stems and stubble (some dry galium stems, small), and lined with a little fine grass and horsehair. I found the egg partly concealed by some dry alder leaves which had fallen into the nest.

About an inch of snow fell last night, but the ground was not at all frozen or prepared for it. A little greener grass and stubble here and there seems to burn its way through it this forenoon. It clears up at noon, and at 2 yp. M. I go to Fair Haven Hill via Hubbard’s Grove. As I sat in the house, I was struck with the bright- ness and heat of the sun reflected from this our first snow. ‘There was an intenser light in the house, and I felt an uncommon heat from the sun’s rays on my back. The air is very clear, and the sky heavenly, with a few floating downy clouds. I am prepared to hear sharp, screaming notes rending the air, from the winter birds. I do, in fact, hear many jays, and the tinkling, ike rattling glass, from chickadees and tree sparrows. I do not detect any peculiar brightness whatever in the osiers on the Hubbard causeway; they are scarcely, if at all, brighter than the tops of the trees. Now first mark the stubble and numerous withered weeds rising above the snow. They have suddenly acquired a new character. ‘Tansy still shows its yellow disks, but yar- row is particularly fresh and perfect, cold and chaste, with its pretty little dry-looking rounded white petals and green leaves. Its very color gives it a right to bloom above the snow, — as level as a snow-crust on the top of the stubble. It looks like a virgin wearing a white ruff. The snow is the great track-revealer. I come across the tracks of persons who, at a different hour from myself, have crossed, and perhaps often cross, some re- mote field on their errands, when I had not suspected a predecessor; and the track of the dog or staff are seen too. The cattle have tracked their whole pasture over, as if there had been a thousand. I have this silent but unerring evidence of any who have crossed the fields since last night. It is pleasant to see tracks lead- ing towards the woods, — to be reminded that any have engagements there. Yet for the most part the snow is quite untrodden. Most fields have no track of man in them. I only see where a squirrel has leaped from the wall. I now remark how the perfectly leafless alder thickets are much darker than the maples, now that the ground is whitened. ‘The pasture directly under my face is white, but, seen aslant a few rods off, mostly russet. Gathered a bagful of fair apples on Fair Haven, show- ing their red cheeks above the snow. I was so warmed in spirit in getting my wood that the heat it finally yielded when burnt was coldness in comparison. That first is a warmth which you cannot buy. i | These apples which I get nowadays — russets and Baldwins — are the ripest of all, being acted on by the frost and partly left because they were slightly over- ripe for keeping. I come home with a heavy bagful and rob no one. 2 Instead of walking in the wood-market amid sharp- visaged teamsters, I float over dark reflecting waters in which I see mirrored the stumps on the bank, and am dazzled by the beauty of a summer duck. Though I should get no wood, I should get a beauty perhaps more valuable. The price of this my wood, however high, is the very thing which I delight to pay. What I obtain with the most labor — the most water-logged and heaviest wood which I fish up from the bottom and split and dry — warms the most. The greater, too, the distance from which I have conveyed it, the more I am warmed by it in my thought. All the intervening shores glow and are warmed by it as it passes, or as I repass them in my mind. And yet men will cut their wood with sorrow, and burn it with lucifer matches. This was where I drove my team afield, and, instead of the grey-fly,t I heard the wood tortoises even yet rustling through the sedge to the water, or the gray squirrel coursing from maple to maple. One man thinks that he has a right to burn his thirty cords in a year because he can give a certain sum of money in exchange for them, but that another has no right to pick up the fagots which else nobody would burn. They who will remember only this kind of right do as if they stood under a shed and affirmed that they were under the unobscured heavens. The shed has its use, but what is it to the heavens above ?? So of the warmth which food, shelter, and clothing ’ [“We drove a-field, and both together heard What time the grey-fly winds her sultry horn.” — Lycidas.] * (Channing, p. 90.] afford, or might afford, if we used economical stoves. We might burn the smoke which now puts our eyes out. The pleasure, the warmth, is not so much in having as in a true and simple manner getting these necessaries. Men prefer foolishly the gold to that of which it is the symbol, — simple, honest, independent labor. Can gold be said to buy food, if it does not buy an appe- tite for food? It is fouler and ugher to have too much than not to have enough.