21 January 1856 – 27 January 1856

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm (vide 19th) at 10 a. M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2.30 p. m. They used a block and tackle with five falls, fastened to the base of a button- wood, and drawn by a horse, to pull it over the right way; so it fell without harm down the road. One said he pulled twenty turns. I measured it at 3 P. M., just after the top had been cut off. It was 15 feet to the first crotch. At 75 feet, the most upright and probably highest limb was cut off, and measured 27 inches in circumference. As near as I could tell from the twigs on the snow, and what the choppers said who had just removed the top, it was about 108 feet high. At 15 feet from the stump, it divided into two parts, about an equal size. One was decayed and broken in the fall, being undermost, the other (which also proved hollow) at its origin was 1154; feet in circumference. (The whole tree directly beneath this crotch was 19-8; round.) This same limb branched again at 368; from the stump, and there measured, just beneath the crotch, 1442 in circumfer- ence. At the ground the stump measured 8,%; one way, 8.3, another, 74 another. It was solid quite through at butt (excepting 3 inches in middle), though some- what decayed within, and I could count pretty well 105 rings, to which add 10 more for the hollow and you have 115.1 There was a currant bush opposite the first crotch, in a large hole at that height, where probably a limb once broke off (making three there), and also a great many stones bigger than a hen’s egg, probably cast in by the boys. ‘There was also part of an old brick with some clay, thirty or forty years within the tree at the stump, completely overgrown and cut through by the axe. I judged that there were at least seven cords then in the road, supposing one main limb sound, and Davis thought that the pile in the yard, from the limbs taken off last week, contained four more. He said that there were some flying squirrels within and upon it when they were taking off the limbs. . There was scarcely any hollowness to be discovered. It had grown very rapidly the first fifty years or so. You could see where there had once been deep clefts between different portions of the trunk at the stump, but the tree had afterward united and overgrown them, leav- ing some bark within the wood. In some places the trunk as it lay on the ground (though flatwise) was as high as a man’s head. This tree stood directly under the hill, which is some sixty feet high, the old burying hill continued, south of where the flagstaff was planted when the British marched into town. This tree must have been some fifty years old and quite sizable then. White, when taking off the limbs, said that he could see all over Sleepy Hollow, beyond the hill. There were several great wens on the trunk, a foot in diameter and nearly as much in height. The tree was so sound [ think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week as the last before it was cut down. They heard ~ it creak in the storm. One of the great limbs which reached over the house was cracked. The two main limbs proved hollow.

P. M. — To Walden. The Walden road is nearly full of snow still, to the top of the wall on the north side, though there has been no snow falling since the 14th. The snow lies particularly solid. Looking toward the sun, the surface consists of great patches of shining crust and dry driving snow, giving it a watered appearance. Miss Minott talks of cutting down the oaks about her house for fuel, because she cannot get her wood sledded home on account of the depth of the snow, though it lies all cut there. James, at R. W. E.’s, waters his cows at the door, because the brook is frozen. If you wish to know whether a tree is hollow, or has a hole in it, ask the squirrels. They know as well as whether they have a home or not. Yet a man lives under it all his life without knowing, and the chopper must fairly cut it up before he can tell. If there is a cleft in it, he is pretty sure to find some nutshell or materials of a bird’s nest left in it. At Brister’s Spring I see where a squirrel has been to the spring and also sat on a low alder limb and eaten a hazelnut. Where does he find a sound hazel- nut now? Has them in a hollow tree. See tracks of fishermen and pickerel. Vide forward. At Walden, near my old residence, I find that since I-was here on the 11th, apparently within a day or two, some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively. The snow under one young pine is covered quite thick with the scales they have dropped while feeding overhead. I count the cores of thirty-four cones on the snow there, and that is not all. Under another pine there are more than twenty, and a well-worn track from this to a fence- post three rods distant, under which are the cores of eight cones and a corresponding amount of scales. gnawed off the cones which were perfectly closed. fie ape the other partly off. He had first sheared off the needles that were in the way, and then gnawed off the sides or cheeks of the twig to come at the stem of the cone, which as usual was cut by successive cuts ip x WE = Uf 4 ALSO gt SfEs, iY SS oe” fi is es ‘ = , as with a knife, while bending it. One or two small, perhaps dead,' certainly unripe ones were taken off and left unopened. I find that many of those young ae pines are now full of unopened cones, which appar- ently will be two years old next summer, and these the squirrel now eats. ‘There are also some of them open, perhaps on the most thrifty twigs. F. Morton hears to-day from Plymouth that three men have just caught in Sandy Pond, in Plymouth, about two hundred pounds of pickerel in two days. Somebody has been fishing in the pond this morn- ing, and the water in the holes is beginning to freeze. I see the track of a crow,’ the toes as usual less spread ——F ee = and the middle one making a more curved furrow in the snow than the partridge, as if they moved more unstably, recovering their balance, — feeble on their feet. The inner toe a little the nearest to the middle one.” This track goes to every hole but one or two out of a dozen, — directly from hole to hole, some- times flying a little, — and also to an apple-core on the snow. I am pretty sure that this bird was after the bait which is usually dropped on the ice or in the hole. E.. Garfield says they come regularly to his holes for bait as soon as he has left. So, if the pickerel are not fed, it is. It had even visited, on the wing, a hole, now frozen and snowed up, which I made far from this in the middle of the pond several days since, as I discovered by its droppings, the same kind that it had left about the first holes. I was surprised, on breaking with my foot the ice in a pickerel-hole near the shore, evidently frozen only ' Vide 24th inst. 2 Vide Feb. Ist. last night, to see the water rise at once half an inch above it. Why should the ice be still sinking? Is it growing more solid and heavier? Most were not aware of the size of the great elm till it was cut down. I surprised some a few days ago by saying that when its trunk should lie prostrate it would be higher than the head of-the tallest man in the town, and that two such trunks could not stand in the chamber we were then in, which was fifteen feet across; that there would be ample room for a double bedstead on the trunk, nay, that the very dinner-table we were sitting at, with our whole party of seven, chairs and all, around it, might be set there. On the decayed part of the butt end there were curious fine black lines, giving it a geographical look, here and there, half a x dozen inches long, some- —— times following the line of the rings; the bound- ary of a part which had reached a certain stage of decay. The force on the pulleys broke off more than a foot in width in the middle of the tree, much decayed. I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town, — I who com- monly do not attend funerals, —as it became me to do. I was the chief if not the only mourner there. I have taken the measure of his grandeur; have spoken a few words of eulogy at his grave, remembering the maxim de mortuis nil nist bonum (in this case magnum). But there were only the choppers and the passers-by to hear me. Further the town was’ not represented; the fathers of the town, the selectmen, the clergy were not there. But I have not known a fitter occa- sion for a sermon of late. Travellers whose journey was for a short time delayed by its prostrate body were forced to pay it some attention and respect, but the axe-boys had climbed upon it like ants, and com- menced chipping at it before it had fairly ceased groan- ing. ‘There was a man already bargaining for some part. How have the mighty fallen! Its history ex- tends back over more than half the whole history of the town. Since its kindred could not conveniently attend, I attended. Methinks its fall marks an epoch in the history of the town. It has passed away together with the clergy of the old school and the stage-coach which used to rattle beneath it. Its virtue was that it steadily grew and expanded from year to year to the very last. How much of old Concord falls with it! The town clerk will not chronicle its fall. I will, for it is of greater moment to the town than that of many a human inhabitant would be. Instead of erecting a monument to it, we take all possible pains to obliter- ate its stump, the only monument of a tree which is commonly allowed to stand. Another link that bound us to the past is broken. How much of old Concord was cut away with it! A few such elms would alone constitute a township. They might claim to send a representative to the General Court to look after their interests, if a fit one could be found, a native American one in a true and worthy sense, with catholic principles. Our town has lost some of its venerableness. No longer will our eyes rest on its massive gray trunk, like a vast Corinthian column by the wayside; no longer shall we walk in the shade of its lofty, spreading dome. It is as if you had laid the axe at the feet of some venerable Buckley or Ripley. You have laid the axe, you have made fast your tackle, to one of the king-posts of the town. I feel the whole building wracked by it. Is it not sacrilege to cut down the tree which has so long looked over Concord beneficently ? Supposing the first fifteen feet to average six feet in diameter, they would contain more than three cords and a foot of wood; but probably not more than three cords. With what feelings should not the citizens hear that the biggest tree in the town has fallen! A traveller passed through the town and saw the inhabitants cut- ting it up without regret. The tracks of the partridges by the sumachs, made before the 11th, are perhaps more prominent now than ever, for they have consolidated the snow under them so that as it settled it has left them alto-relievo. They look like broad chains extending straight far over the snow.

Brown is filling his ice-house. The clear ice is only from one and a half to four inches thick; all the rest, or nearly a foot, is snow ice, formed by the snow sinking the first under the water and freezing with the water. The same is the case at Walden. To get ice at all clear or transparent, you must scrape the snow off after each fall. Very little ice is formed by addition below, such a snowy winter as this. There was a white birch scale yesterday on the snowed-up hole which I made in the very middle of Walden. I have no doubt they blow across the widest part of the pond. When approaching the pond yesterday, through my bean-field, I saw where some fishermen had come away, and the tails of their string of pickerel had trailed on the deep snow where they sank in it. I afterward saw where they had been fishing that forenoon, the water just beginning to freeze, and also where some had fished the day before with red-finned minnows, which were frozen into an inch of ice; that these men had chewed tobacco and ate apples. All this I knew, though I saw neither man nor squirrel nor pickerel nor crow. Measured, this afternoon, the snow in the same fields which I measured just a week ago, to see how it had settled. It has been uniformly fair weather of average winter coldness, without any thaw.’ West of railroad it averages 114+. (On the 16th it was 12}.) East of railroad, 14 inches (16th, 153). Or average of both 12$+1—say 123. It has settled, therefore, in open fields 1515 inches, showing how very solid it is, as many have remarked. Not allowing for what of the light snow above the crust may have drifted against the railroad embankment (though I measured on both sides of it).? Trillium Woods, 134+ ;* 16th it was 17.4 Has settled 33. It seems, then, that, as it lies light in the wood at first, it settles much faster there, so that, though it was nearly 34 inches the deepest there a week ago, it is less than 1 inch the deepest there now.

A journal is a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said. I am occasionally reminded of a statement which I have made in conversation and immediately forgotten, which would read much better than what I put in my journal. It is a ripe, dry fruit of long-past experience which falls from me easily, without giving pain or pleasure. The charm of the journal must consist in a certain greenness, though freshness, and not in maturity. Here I cannot afford to be remembering what I said or did, my scurf cast off, but what I am and aspire to become. Reading the hymns of the Rig Veda, translated by Wilson, which consist in a great measure of simple epithets addressed to the firmament, or the dawn, or 1 144 +. * The drifting of light surface snow may have produced nearly all the change. 315} +. 419. the winds, which mean more or less as the reader is more or less alert and imaginative, and seeing how widely the various translators have differed, they re- garding not the poetry, but the history and philology, dealing with very concise Sanscrit, which must almost always be amplified to be understood, I am some- times inclined to doubt if the translator has not made something out of nothing, — whether a real idea or sentiment has been thus transmitted to us from so primitive a period. I doubt if learned Germans might not thus edit pebbles from the seashore into hymns of the Rig Veda, and translators translate them accord- ingly, extracting the meaning which the sea has im- parted to them in very primitive times. While the commentators and translators are disputing about the meaning of this word or that, I hear only the resound- ing of the ancient sea and put into it all the meaning I am possessed of, the deepest murmurs [ can recall, for I do not the least care where I get my ideas, or what suggests them. I knew that a crow had that day plucked the cedar berries and barberries by Flint’s Pond and then flapped silently through the trackless air to Walden, where it dined on fisherman’s bait, though there was no living creature to tell me. Holbrook’s elm measured to-day 11 feet 4 inches in circumference at six feet from ground, the size of one of the branches of the Davis elm (call it the Lee elm, for a Lee formerly lived there). Cheney’s largest in front of Mr. Frost’s, 12 feet 4 inches, at six feet; 16 feet 6 inches, at one foot. The great elm opposite Keyes’s land, near by (call it the Jones elm): 17 feet 6 inches, at two behind and one plus before; 15 feet 10 inches, at four; 15 feet 5 inches, at six; 16 feet at seven and a half, or spike on west side. At the smallest place between the ground and branches, this is a little bigger than the Davis elm, but it is not so big at or near the ground, nor is it so high to the branching, — about twelve feet, — nor are the branches so big, but it is much sounder, and its top broader, fuller, and handsomer. This has an uncommonly straight-sided and solid-looking trunk, measuring only two feet less at six feet from the ground than at two. P. M. — Up Assabet. Even the patches of shining snow-crust between those of dry white surface snow are slightly blue, like ice and water. You may walk anywhere on the river now. Even the open space against Merrick’s, below the Rock, has been closed again, and there is only six feet of water there now. I walk with a peculiar sense of freedom over the snow-covered ice, not fearing that I shall break through. I have not been able to find any tracks of muskrats this winter. I suspect that they very rarely venture out in winter with their wet coats. I see squirrel-tracks about the hemlocks. V7 04 They are much like rabbits, only the toes we ay are very distinct. From this they 3 passintoasemicircular figuresome- ‘% times. Some of the first are six inches from ® outside to outside lengthwise, with one to two feet of interval. . = «& > Are these the gray or red? A great many hemlock cones have fallen on the snow and rolled down the hill. Higher up, against the Wheeler Swamp, I see where many squirrels — perhaps red, for the tracks appear smaller— have fed on the alder cones on the twigs which are low or frozen into the ice, stripping them to the core just as they do the pine cones. Here are the tracks of a crow, like those of the 22d, with a long hind toe, nearly two inches. The two feet are also nearly two inches apart. I see where the bird alighted, descending with an impetus and breaking through the slight crust, planting its feet side by side. How different this partridge-track, with its slight hind toe, open and wide-spread toes on each side, both feet forming one straight line, exactly thus: — +€¢€ &$ Fe €F EE HE (Five ‘inches from centre to centre.) The middle toe alternately curved to the right and to the left, and what is apparently the outer toe in each case shorter than the inner one. I see under a great many trees, black willow, and swamp white oak, the bark scattered over the snow, some pieces six inches long, and above see the hole which a woodpecker has bored. The snow is so deep along the sides of the river that I can now look into nests which I could hardly reach in the summer. I can hardly believe them the same. They have only an ice egg in them now. Thus we go about, raised, generally speaking, more than a foot above the summer level. So much higher do we carry our heads in the winter. What a great odds such a little difference makes! When the snow raises us one foot higher than we have been accustomed to walk, we are surprised at our elevation! So we soar. I do not find a foot of open water, even, on this North Branch, as far as I go, 2. e. to J. Hosmer’s lot. The river has been frozen unusually long and solidly. They have been sledding wood along the river for a quarter of a mile in front of Merriam’s and past the mouth of Sam Barrett’s Brook, where it is bare of snow, — hard, glare ice on which there is scarcely a trace of the sled or oxen. They have sledded home a large oak which was cut down on the bank. Yet this is one of the rockiest and swiftest parts of the stream. Where I have so often stemmed the swift current, dodg- ing the rocks, with my paddle, there the heavy, slow- paced oxen, with their ponderous squeaking load, have plodded, while the teamster walked musing beside it. That Wheeler swamp is a great place for squirrels. I observe many of their tracks along the riverside there. The nests are of leaves, and apparently of the gray species. There is much of the water milkweed on the little island just above Dove Rock. It rises above the deep snow there. It is remarkable how much the river has been tracked by dogs the week past, not accompanied by their masters. They hunt, perchance, in the night more than is sup- posed, for I very rarely see one alone by day. The river is pretty low and has fallen within a month, for there has been no thaw. The ice has broken and settled around the rocks, which look as if they had burst up through it. Some maple limbs which were early frozen in have been broken and stripped down by this irresistible weight. You see where the big dogs have slipped on one or two feet in their haste, sinking to the ice, but, having two more feet, it did not delay them. I walk along the sides of the stream, admiring the rich mulberry catkins of the alders, which look almost edible. They attract us because they have so much of spring in them. ‘The clear red osiers, too, along the riverside in front of Merriam’s on Wheeler’s side. I have seen many a collection of stately elms which better deserved to be represented at the General Court than the manikins beneath, — than the barroom and victualling cellar and groceries they overshadowed. When I see their magnificent domes, miles away in the horizon, over intervening valleys and forests, they sug- gest a village, a community, there. But, after all, it is a secondary consideration whether there are human dwellings beneath them; these may have long since passed away. I find that into my idea of the village has entered more of the elm than of the human being. They are worth many a political borough. ‘They constitute a borough. The poor human representative of his party sent out from beneath their shade will not suggest a tithe of the dignity, the true nobleness and comprehensive- ness of view, the sturdiness and independence, and the serene beneficence that they do. They look from town- ship to township. A fragment of their bark is worth the backs of all the politicians in the union. They are free-soilers in their own broad sense. They send their roots north and south and east and west into many a conservative’s Kansas and Carolina, who does not suspect such underground railroads, — they improve the subsoil he has never disturbed, — and many times their length, if the support of their principles requires it. They battle with the tempests of a century. See what scars they bear, what limbs they lost before we were born! Yet they never adjourn; they steadily vote for their principles, and send their roots further and wider from the same centre. They die at their posts, and they leave a tough butt for the choppers to exer- cise themselves about, and a stump which serves for their monument. They attend no caucus, they make no compromise, they use no policy. Their one prin- ciple is growth. They combine a true radicalism -with a true conservatism. ‘Their radicalism is not cutting away of roots, but an infinite multiplication and ex- tension of them under all surrounding institutions. They take a firmer hold on the earth that they may rise higher into the heavens. Their conservative heart- wood, in which no sap longer flows, does not impoverish their growth, but is a firm column to support it; and when their expanding trunks no longer require it, it utterly decays. Their conservatism is a dead but solid heart-wood, which is the pivot and firm column of sup- port to all this growth, appropriating nothing to itself, but forever by its support assisting to extend the area of their radicalism. Half a century after they are dead at the core, they are preserved by radical reforms. They do not, like men, from radicals turn conservative. Their conservative part dies out first; their radical and growing part survives. They acquire new States and Territories, while the old dominions decay, and become the habitation of bears and owls and coons.

P. M. — Up river. The hardest day to bear that we have had, for, be- side being 5° at noon and at 4 p. M., there is a strong northwest wind. It is worse than when the thermometer was at zero all day. Pierce says it is the first day that he has not been able to work outdoors in the sun. The snow is now very dry and powdery, and, though so hard packed, drifts somewhat., The travellers I meet have red faces. Their ears covered. Pity those who have not thick mittens. No man could stand it to travel far toward this wind. It stiffens the whole face, and you feel a tingling sensation in your forehead. Much worse to bear than a still cold. I see no life abroad, no bird nor beast. What a stern, bleak, inhospitable aspect nature now wears! (I am off Clamshell Hill.) Where a few months since was a fertilizing river reflecting the sunset, and luxuriant meadows resounding with the hum of insects, is now a uniform crusted snow, with dry powdery snow drifting over it and confound- ing river and meadow. I make haste away, covering my ears, before I freeze there. The snow in the road has frozen dry, as dry as bran. A closed pitch pine cone gathered January 22d opened last night in my chamber. If you would be convinced how differently armed the squirrel is naturally for deal- ing with pitch pine cones, just try to get one off with your teeth. He who extracts the seeds from a single closed cone with the aid of a knife will be constrained to confess that the squirrel earns his dinner. It is a rugged customer, and will make your fingers bleed. But the squirrel has the key to this conical and spiny chest of many apartments. He sits on a post, vibrat- ing his tail, and twirls it as a plaything. But so is a man commonly a locked-up chest to us, to open whom, unless we have the key of sympathy, will make our hearts bleed. The elms, they adjourn not night nor day; they pair not off. They stand for magnificence; they take the brunt of the tempest; they attract the lightning that would smite our roofs, leaving only a few rotten members scattered over the highway. The one by Holbrook’s is particularly regular and lofty for. its girth, a perfect sheaf, but thin-leaved, apparently a slow grower. It bore a tavern sign for many a year. Call it the Bond (?) elm.

When I took the ether my consciousness amounted to this: I put my finger on myself in order to keep the place, otherwise I should never have returned to this world. They have cut and sawed off the butt of the great elm at nine and a half feet from the ground, and I counted the annual rings there with the greatest ease and accuracy. Indeed I never saw them so distinct on a large butt. The tree was quite sound there, not the least hollow even at the pith. There were one hundred and twenty-seven rings. Supposing the tree to have been five years old when nine and a half feet high, then it was one hundred and thirty-two years old, or came up in the year 1724, just before Lovewell’s Fight. There were two centres, fourteen inches apart. The accompanying coarse sketch will give a gen- eral idea of it. There were thirteen distinct rings about each centre, before they united and one ring inclosed both. Then there was a piece of bark, — which may be rudely represented by the upper black mark, — say six or eight inches long. This was not overgrown but by the twenty-fourth ring. These two centres of growth corresponded in position to the two main branches six feet above, and I inferred that when the tree was about eighteen years old, the fork commenced at nine and a half feet from the ground, but as it increased in diameter, it united higher and higher up. I remember that the bark was considerably nearer one centre than the other. There was bark in several places completely overgrown and included on the extreme butt end where cut off, having apparently overgrown its own furrows. Its diameter, where I counted the rings, was, one way, as near as I could measure in spite of the carf, four feet and three inches; another, four feet and eight inches; and five feet. On the line by which I counted, which was the long way of the tree, it had grown in the first fifty years twenty inches, or two fifths of an inch a year; the last fifty, five and three quarters inches or about one ninth of an inch a year; and there was a space of about five inches between the two, or for the intermediate twenty-seven years. At this height, it had grown on an average annually nearly twenty-four one-hundredths of an inch from the centre on one side. The white or sap wood averaged about two inches thick. The bark was from one to two inches thick, and in the last case I could ce count from twelve to = =22-> == — fifteen distinct rings in ee eee —— =o => -=-—=— it,as if it were regularly shed after that period. The court-house elm measured, at six feet from the ground on the west side, twelve feet one and one half inches in circumference. The willow by the Jim Jones house, fourteen feet at about eighteen inches from ground; thirteen feet eight inches, at about six inches from ground; and it bulged out much larger above this. P. M. — Walked down the river as far as the south bend behind Abner Buttrick’s. I also know its condition as far as the Hubbard Bridge in the other direction. There is not a square foot open between these extremes, and, judging from what I know of the river beyond these limits, I may safely say that it is not open (the main stream, I mean) anywhere in the town. (Of the North Branch above the Bath Place, the goose ground, say to the stone bridge, I cannot speak confidently.*) The same must have been the case yesterday, since it was colder. Probably the same has been true of the river, excepting the small space against Merrick’s be- low the Rock (now closed), since January 7th, when it closed at the Hubbard Bath, or nearly three weeks, —a long time, methinks, for it to be frozen so solidly. A sleigh might safely be driven now from Carlisle Bridge to the Sudbury meadows on the river. Methinks it is a remarkably cold, as well as snowy, January, for we have had good sleighing ever since the 26th of December and no thaw. | Walked as far as Flint’s Bridge with Abel Hunt, where I took to the river. I told him I had come to walk on the river as the best place, for the snow had drifted somewhat in the road, while it was con- verted into ice almost entirely on the river. “But,” asked he, “are you not afraid that you will get in?” “Oh, no, it will bear a load of wood from one end to the other.” “But then there may be some weak places.” Yet he is some seventy years old and was born and bred immediately on its banks. Truly one half the world does not know how the other half lives. Men have been talking now for a week at the post- office about the age of the great elm, as a matter inter- esting but impossible to be determined. The very chop- pers and travellers have stood upon its prostrate trunk and speculated upon its age, as if it were a profound mystery. I stooped and read its years to them (127 at nine and a half feet), but they heard me as the wind that once sighed through its branches. They still sur- mised that it might be two hundred years old, but they never stooped to read the inscription. Truly they love darkness rather than light. One said it was probably one hundred and fifty, for he had heard somebody say that for fifty years the elm grew, for fifty it stood still, and for fifty it was dying. (Wonder what portion of his career he stood still!) Truly all men are not men of science. They dwell within an integument of preju- dice thicker than the bark of the cork-tree, but it is valuable chiefly to stop bottles with. Tied to their buoyant prejudices, they keep themselves afloat when honest swimmers sink. Talking with Miss Mary Emerson this evening, she said, “It was not the fashion to be so original when I was young.” She is readier to take my view — look through my eyes for the time — than any young per- son that I know in the town. The white maple buds look large, with bursting downy scales as in spring. I observe that the crust is strongest over meadows, though the snow is deep there and there is no ice nor water beneath, but in pastures and upland generally I break through. Probably there is more moisture to be frozen in the former places, and the snow is more compact.

I have just sawed a wheel an inch and three quarters thick off the end of (apparently) a stick of red oak in my pile. I count twenty-nine rings, and about the same number of rings, or divisions of some kind, with more or less distinctness, in the bark, which is about a quarter of an inch thick. Is not the whole number of rings contained in the bark of all trees which have a bark externally smooth? This stick has two centres of growth, each a little one side of the middle. I trace one easily to a limb which was cut off close to the tree about three and a half inches above the lower side of the section. The two centres are one inch apart on the lower side, two inches and five eighths on the upper side. There are three complete circles to the main one on the lower side, and ten on the upper side, before they coalesce; hence it was seven years closing up through an inch and three quarters of height. There is a rough ridge, con- fined to the bark only and > ——— about a quarter of an inch me ; high, extending from the “7 crotch diagonally down the tree, apparently to a point over the true centre of growth. P. M.— Walked on the river from the old stone to Derby’s Bridge. It is open a couple of rods under the stone bridge, but not a rod below it, and also for forty rods below the mouth of Loring’s Brook, along the west side, probably because this is a mill-stream. The only other open places within the limits mentioned yesterday are in one or two places close under the bank, and concealed by it, where warm springs issue, the river, after freezing, having shrunk and the ice settled a foot or eighteen inches there, so that you can see water over its edge. The white maple at Derby’s Bridge measures fifteen feet in circumference at ground, including apparently a very large sucker, and ten feet five inches, at four feet above the ground, not including sucker, there free. The lodging snow of January 13th, just a fortnight ago, still adheres in deep and conspicuous ridges to large exposed trees, too stubborn to be shaken by the wind, showing from which side the storm came. The fruit stems of the dog- wood still hold on, and a little pe ) 7 fruit. (Of course, the limbs should be smoother.) The out- t line much like a peach tree, } but it is without the, numerous small limbs or twigs. Saw what I think were bass nuts on the snow on the river, at Derby’s railroad bridge, probably from up-stream.