7 January 1856 – 13 January 1856

At breakfast time the thermometer stood at -12°. Earlier it was probably much lower. Smith’s was at —24° early this morning. The latches are white with frost at noon. They say there was yet more snow at Boston, two feet even. They tell how I swung on a gown [?]on the seirway when I was at Chelmsford. The gown [?] gave way; I fell and fainted, and it took two pails of water to bring me to, for I was remarkable for holding my breath in those cases. Mother tried to milk the cow which Father took on trial, but she kicked at her and spilt the milk. (They say a dog had bitten her teats.) Proctor laughed at her as a city girl, and then he tried, but the cow kicked him over, and he finished by beating her with his cow- hide shoe. Captain Richardson «milked her warily, standing up. Father came home, and thought he would “brustle right up to her,”’ for she needed much to be milked, but’ suddenly she lifted her leg and “struck him fair and square right in the muns,” knocked him flat, and broke the bridge of his nose, which shows it yet. He distinctly heard her hoof rattle on his nose. This “started the claret,” and, without stanching the blood, he at once drove her home to the man he had her of. She ran at some young women by the way, who saved themselves by getting over the wall in haste. Father complained of the powder in the meeting- house garret at town meeting, but it did not get moved while we lived there. Here he painted over his old signs for guide-boards, and got a fall when painting Hale’s (?) factory. Here the bladder John was play- ing with burst on the hearth. The cow came into the entry after pumpkins. I cut my toe, and was knocked over by a hen with chickens, etc., etc. Mother tells how, at the brick house, we each had a little garden a few feet square, and I came in one day, having found a potato just sprouted, which by her advice I planted in my garden. Ere long John came in with a potato which he had found and had it planted in his garden, — “Oh, mother, I have found a potato all sprouted. I mean to put it in my garden,” etc. Even Helen is said to have found one. But next I came crying that somebody had got my potato, etc., etc., but it was restored to me as the youngest and original discoverer, if not inventor, of the potato, and it grew in my garden, and finally its crop was dug by myself and yielded a dinner for the family. I was kicked down by a passing ox. Had a chicken given me by Lidy — Hannah — and peeped through the keyhole at it. Caught an eel with John. Went to bed with new boots on, and after with cap. ‘“ Rasselas”’ given me, etc., etc. Asked P. Wheeler, “Who owns all the land?” Asked Mother, having got the medal for geo- graphy, “Is Boston in Concord?” If I had gone to Miss Wheeler a little longer, should have received the chief prize book, “Henry Lord Mayor,” etc., etc. P. M. — Up river. The snow is much deeper on the river than it was, —on an average, eight or nine inches. ‘The cold weather has brought the crows, and for the first time this winter I hear them cawing amid the houses. I noticed yes- terday, from three to six feet behind or northwest of a small elm, a curve in a drift answering to the tree, showing how large an eddy it had produced. The whole surface of the snow on fields and river is com- posed now of flat, rough little drifts, like the surface of some rough slaty rocks. Hardly anywhere is the ice . visible now. It is completely frozen at the Hubbard’s Bath bend now, —a small strip of dark ice, thickly sprinkled with those rosettes of crystals, two or three inches in diameter, this surrounded by a broad border of yellow- ish spew. The water has oozed out from the thinnest part of the black ice, and I see a vapor curling up from it. ‘There is also much vapor in the air, looking toward the woods. I go along the edge of the Hubbard Meadow woods, the north side, where the snow is gathered, light and up to my middle, shaking down birds’ nests. Returning, just before sunset, the few little patches of ice look green as I go from the sun (which 1s in clouds). It is probably a constant phenomenon in cold weather when the ground is covered with snow and the sun is low, morning or evening, and you are looking from it. I see birch scales (bird-like) on the snow on the river more than twenty rods south of the nearest and only birch, and trace them north to it.

P. M. —To Walden. The snow is about a foot, or probably a little more, deep on a level, and considerably drifted, but on the pond it is not more than five inches deep on an average, being partly turned into snow ice by the sinking of the ice, and perhaps partly blown off. Many catbird-nests about the pond. In apparently one I see a snake’s slough interwoven. ‘The leaves of red oak shrubs are still quite bloody-colored. All of the pitch pine cones that I see, but one, are open.! I see prying into the black fruit of the alder, along the pond-side, a single probably lesser redpoll (?). Yel- lowish breast and distinct white bar on wing. Monroe is fishing there. As usual, a great pickerel had bitten and ran off, and was lost, he. supposed, among the brush by the shore. He tells of an eel up the North Branch that weighed seven pounds; also that George Melvin, spearing one night, speared a * large owl (probably cat owl) that sat near by. For a couple of days the cars have been very much delayed by the snow, and it is now drifting somewhat. The fine dry snow is driving over the fields like steam, if you look toward the sun, giving a new form to the sur- face, spoiling the labor of the track-repairers, gradually burying the rails. The surface of the snow on the pond is finely scored in many places by the oak leaves which have been blown across it. They have furrowed deeper than a mouse’s track and might puzzle a citizen. They are more frisky than a squirrel. Many of the young oaks appear not to have lost any leaves yet. They are so full of them that they still sustain some masses of snow, as if there were birds’ nests for a core. I see the great tracks of white rabbits that have run and frisked in the night along the pond-side.

Clear, cold morning. Smith’s thermometer — 16°; ours — 14° at breakfast time, — 6° at 9 A. Mm. 3 p. M. — To Beck Stow’s.. The thermometer at + 2°. When I return at 4.30, it is at —2°. Probably it has been below zero far the greater part of the day. I meet choppers, apparently coming home early on account of the cold. I wade through the swamp, where the snow les light eighteen inches ! deep on a level, a few leaves of andromedas, etc., peeping out. (I am a-birds’-nesting.) The mice have been out and run over it. I see one large bush of winter-berries still quite showy, though somewhat discolored by the cold. The rabbits have run in paths about the swamp. Go now anywhere in the swamp and fear no water. The fisherman whom I saw on Walden last night will find his lines well frozen in this morning. In passing through the deep cut on the new Bedford road, [I saw] that a little sand, which was pretty coarse, almost gravel, had fallen from the bank, and was blown over the snow, here and there. The surface of the snow was diversified by those slight drifts, or perhaps cliffs, which are left a few inches high (lke the fracture of slate rocks), with a waved outline, and all the sand was collected in waving lines just on the edge of these little drifts, in ridges, maybe an eighth of an inch high. This may help decide how those drifts (?) or cliffs (?) are formed.’ It has not been so cold throughout the day, before, this winter. I hear the boots of passing travellers squeak.

‘The weather has considerably moderated; — 2° at breakfast time (it was — 8° at seven last evening); but this has been the coldest night probably. You lie with your feet or legs curled up, waiting for morning, the sheets shining with frost about your mouth. Water left by the stove is frozen thickly, and what you sprinkle in bathing falls on the floor ice. The house plants are all frozen and soon droop and turn black. I look out on the roof of a cottage covered a foot deep with snow, wondering how the poor children in its garret, with their few rags, contrive to keep their toes warm. I mark the white smoke from its chimney, whose con- tracted wreaths are soon dissipated in this stinging air, and think of the size of their wood-pile, and again I try to realize how they panted for a breath of cool air those sultry nights last summer. Realize it now if you can. Recall the hum of the mosquito. 1 ‘Yet when it blows and drifts again it presents a similar appear- ance. It seems that the snow-storm of Saturday night was a remarkable one, reaching many hundred miles along the coast. It is said that some thousands passed the night in cars. The kitchen windows were magnificent last night, with their frost sheaves, surpassing any cut or ground glass. ° I love to wade and flounder through the swamp now,’ these bitter cold days when the snow lies deep on the ground, and I need travel but little way from the town to get to a Nova Zembla solitude, — to wade through the swamps, all snowed up, untracked by man, into which the fine dry snow is still drifting till it is even with the tops of the water andromeda and half- way up the high blueberry bushes. I penetrate to islets inaccessible in summer, my feet slumping to the sphag- num far out of sight beneath, where the alder berry glows yet and the azalea buds, and perchance a single tree sparrow or a chickadee lisps by my side, where there are few tracks even of wild animals; perhaps only a mouse or two have burrowed up by the side of some twig, and hopped away in straight lines on the surface of the light, deep snow, as if too timid to delay, to another hole by the side of another bush; and a few rabbits have run in a path amid the blueberries and alders about the edge of the swamp. This is instead of a Polar Sea expedition and going after Franklin. There is but little life and but few objects, it is true. We are reduced to admire buds, even like the par- tridges, and bark, like the rabbits and mice, — the great yellow and red forward-looking buds of the azalea, the plump red ones of the blueberry, and the fine sharp red ones of the panicled andromeda, sleeping along its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid-growing dogwood, the pale-brown and cracked blueberry, etc. Even a little shining bud which lies sleeping be- hind its twig and dreaming of spring, perhaps half concealed by ice, is object enough. I feel myself up- borne on the andromeda bushes beneath the snow, as on a springy basketwork, then down I go up to my middle in the deep but silent snow, which has no sym- pathy with my mishap. Beneath the level of this snow how many sweet berries will be hanging next August! This freezing weather I see the pumps dressed in mats and old clothes or bundled up in straw. Fortunate he who has placed his cottage on the south side of some high hill or some dense wood, and not on the middle of the Great Fields, where there is no hill nor tree to shelter it. There the winds have full sweep, and such a day as yesterday the house is but a fence to stay the drift- ing snow. Such is the piercing wind, no man loiters between his house and barn. The road-track is soon obliterated, and the path which leads round to the back of the house, dug this morning, is filled up again, and you can no longer see the tracks of the master of the house, who only an hour ago took refuge in some half- subterranean apartment there. You know only by an occasional white wreath of smoke from his chimney, which is at once snapped up by the hungry air, that he sits warming his wits there within, studying the almanac to learn how long it is before spring. But his neighbor, who, only half a mile off, has placed his house in the shelter of a wood, is digging out of a drift his pile of roots and stumps, hauled from the swamp,. at which he regularly dulls his axe and saw, reducing them to billets that will fit his stove. With comparative safety and even comfort he labors at this mine. As for the other, the windows give no sign of inhabit- ants, for they are frosted over as if they were ground glass, and the curtains are down beside. The path is snowed up, and all tracks to and fro. No sound issues from within. It remains only to examine the chimney’s nostrils. I look long and sharp at it, and fancy that I see some smoke against [the] sky there, but this [is] deceptive, for, as we are accustomed to walk up to an empty fireplace and imagine that we feel some heat from it, so I have convinced myself that I saw smoke issuing from the chimney of a house which had not been inhabited for twenty years. I had so vivid an idea of smoke curling up from a chimney’s top that no painter could have matched my imagination, It was as if the spirits of the former inhabitants, revisiting their old haunts, were once more boiling a spiritual kettle below, — a small whitish-bluish cloud, almost instantly dissipated, as if the fire burned with a very clear flame, or else, the postmeridian hours having arrived, it were partially raked up, and the inhabitants were taking their siesta. P. M. — Worked on flower-press.

P. M. — To Walden. Cold as the weather has been for some days, it [is]

Moderating, though at zero at 9 a. M. P. M. — To Andromeda Swamps, measuring snow. It is a fortnight since we had about a foot of snowfall on two or three inches which was firmly crusted, and a week since about six inches fell upon the last, — I guess at these depths, — and we have had clear cold weather ever since. I carry a four-foot stick marked in inches, striking it down as far as it will go at every tenth step. First, beginning in the first field west of the railroad causeway, four to six rods from the railroad, and walking parallel with the railroad, — open fields north to south: — [For table of measurements, see next page. | 145 309 Then Trillium, a 19 10 10 10 11 thick, chiefly pine 1] 8 12 8 8 wood, seventy- 14 9 bh 8 10 five years old. 10 14 6 8 13 North to south. 7 15 8 12 9 8 12 13 7 8 10 12 9 28 9 12 13 8 7 wall 10 14 fence) 10 10t apple 6 7 11 9 10 8 tree 7 6 9 7 wall 11 9 a 1] 10 20 11 9 a 9 10 16 9 10 7 422 10 598 8 10 8 Thencross 7 13)728 9 6 10 to east of 9 Average 10 9 12 railroad, 14 say 10? ~10 145! 9 six rods 9 7 309 off, in 11 10 Stow’s 429 12 meadow. 598 8 9 10 11 19)182 (say 93 Other things being equal, the snow should be deeper in woods than in open fields because the trunks of trees take up room there, but this may be more than bal- anced by what is dissipated on the branches. * [A mistake in addition here. The column foots up 155.] * Add 2 for ice at bottom to all the depths of snow to Feb. 12th, q. v. Then sprout-land between railroad and Andromeda Pond, down-hill to- ward the west. 12)187 (say 154?

Sunrise. — A heavy lodging snow, almost rain, has been falling —how long? —coming from the eastward. The weather comparatively warm, but windy. It will probably turn to rain. Say four or five inches deep. It sticks to the sides of the houses. Took to pieces a pensile nest which I found the 11th on the south shore of Walden on an oak sapling (red or black), about fifteen feet from the ground. Though small, it measures three inches by three in the extreme, and was hung between two horizontal twigs or in a fork forming about a right angle, the third side being regu- larly rounded without any very stiff material. The twigs extended two or three inches beyond the nest. The bulk of it is composed of fine shreds or fibres, pretty long (say three to six inches), of apparently inner oak (?) bark, judging from some scraps of the epidermis adhering. It looks at first sight like sedge or grass. ‘The bottom, which I accidentally broke off and disturbed the arrangement of, was composed of this and white and pitch pine needles and little twigs about the same size and form, rough, with little leaf-stalks or feet (probably hemlock (?) 1), and also strips and curls of paper birch epidermis, and some horet or other wasp nest used like the last. I mention the most abundant material first. Probably the needles and twigs were used on account of their curved form ?and elasticity, to give shape to the bottom. The sides, which were not so thick, were composed of bark shreds, paper birch, and hornet-nest (the two latter chiefly outside, probably to bind and conceal and keep out the wind), agglutinated together. But most pains was taken with the thin edge and for three quarters of an inch down, where, beside the bark-fibres, birch paper, and hornets’ nest, some silky reddish-brown and also white fibre was used to bind all with, almost spun into threads and passed over the twigs and agglutinated to them, or over the bark edge. The shreds of birch paper were smaller there, and the hornets’ nest looked as if it had been reduced to a pulp by the bird and spread very thinly here and there over all, mixed with the brown silk. This last looked like cow’s hair, but as I found a piece of a small brown cocoon, though a little paler, I suspect it was from that.* The white may have been from a cocoon, or else vegetable silk. Probably a vireo’s nest, maybe red-eye’s.