15 December 1856 – 21 December 1856

P. M. — Cold, with a piercing northwest wind and bare ground still. The river, which was raised by the rain of the 14th and ran partly over the meadows, is frozen over again, and I go along the edge of the meadow under Clamshell and back by Hub- bard’s Bridge. At Clamshell, to my surprise, scare up either a wood- cock or a snipe. I think the former, for I plainly saw considerable red on the breast, also a light stripe along the neck. It was feeding alone, close to the edge of the hill, where it is springy and still soft, almost the only place of this character in the neighborhood, and though I started it three times, it each time flew but little way, round to the hillside again, perhaps the same spot it had left a moment before, as if unwilling to leave this unfrozen and comparatively warm locality. It was a great surprise this bitter cold day, when so many springs were frozen up, to see this hardy bird loitering still. Once alighted, you could not see it till it arose again. In Saw Mill Brook, as I crossed it, I saw the tail dis- appearing of some muskrat or other animal, flapping in the cold water, where all was ice around. A flock of a dozen or more tree sparrows flitting through the edge of the birches, etc., by the meadow front of Puffer’s. They make excursions into the open meadow and, as I approach, take refuge in the brush. I hear their faint cheep, a very feeble evidence of their existence, and also a pretty little suppressed warbling from them.

12 m. Start for Amherst, N. H. A verycold day. ‘Thermometer at 8 a.m. — 8° (and I hear of others very much lower at an earlier hour), — 2° at 11.45. I find the first snow enough to whiten the ground beyond Littleton, and it deepens all the way to Am- herst. ‘The steam of the engine hugs the earth very close. Is it because it [is] a very clear, cold day? The last half the route from Groton Junction to Nashua is along the Nashua River mostly. This river looks less interesting than the Concord. It appears even more open, 2. €. less wooded (?). At any rate the banks are more uniform, and I notice none of our meadows on it. At Nashua, hire a horse and sleigh, and ride to Amherst, eleven miles, against a strong northwest wind, this bitter cold afternoon. When I get to South Merri- mack, about 3.15 p. m., they tell me the thermometer is —3°. While the driving hand is getting benumbed, T am trying to warm the other against my body under the buffalo. Warm myself there in the shop of a tub and pail maker, who does his work by hand, splitting out the staves with a curved knife and smoothing them with curved shaves. His hoops are white ash, shaved thin. After entering Amherst territory, near the Sou- hegan, notice many shagbark trees, which they tell me the owners value as they do a good apple tree, getting a dozen bushels of shelled nuts sometimes from a tree. I see the nuts on some still. At my lecture, the audience attended to me closely, and I was satisfied; that is all I ask or expect generally. Not one spoke to me afterward, nor needed they. I have no doubt that they liked it, in the main, though few of them would have dared say so, provided they were conscious of it. Generally, if I can only get the ears of an audience, I do not care whether they say they like my lecture or not. I think I know as well as they can tell. At any rate, it is none of my business, and it would be impertinent for me to inquire. ‘The stupidity of most of these country towns, not to include the cities, is in its innocence infantile. Lectured in basement (vestry) of the orthodox church, and I trust helped to undermine it. I was told to stop at the U. S. Hotel, but an old inhabitant had never heard of it and could not tell me where to find it, but I found the letters on a sign with- out help. It was the ordinary unpretending (?) deso- late-looking country tavern. The landlord apologized to me because there was to be a ball there that night which would keep me awake, and it did. He and others there, horrible to relate, were in the habit of blowing their noses with their fingers and wiping them on their boots! Champney’s U. S. Hotel was an ordinary team tavern, and the letters U. S., properly enough, not very conspicuous on the sign.

Knew the road by some yellow birch trees in a swamp and some rails set on end around a white oak in a pasture. These it seems were the objects I had noticed. In Nashua observed, as I thought, some elms in the distance which had been whitewashed. It turned out that they were covered from top to bottom, on one side, with the frozen vapor from a fall on the canal. Walked a little way along the bank of the Merrimack, which was frozen over, and was agreeably reminded of my voyage up it. The night previous, in Amherst, I had been awaked by the loud cracking of the ground, which shook the house like the explosion of a powder- mill. In the morning there was to be seen a long crack across the road in front. I saw several of these here in Nashua, and ran a bit of stubble into them but in no place more than five inches. This is a sound peculiar to the coldest nights. Observed that the Nashua in Pepperell was frozen to the very edge of the fall, and even further in some places. Got home at 1.30 Pp. M. P. M. — To Walden. Walden froze completely over last night. This is very sudden, for on the evening of the 15th there was not a particle of ice in it. In just three days, then, it has been completely frozen over, and the ice is now from two and a half to three inches thick, a transpar- ent green ice, through which I see the bottom where it is seven or eight feet deep. I detect its thickness by looking at the cracks, which are already very numerous, but, having been made at different stages of the ice, they indicate very various thicknesses. Often one only an inch deep crosses at right angles another two and a half inches deep, the last having been recently made and indicating the real thickness of the ice. I advance confidently toward the middle, keeping within a few feet of some distinct crack two inches or more deep, but when that fails me and I see only cracks an inch or an inch and a half deep, or none at all, I walk with great caution and timidity, though the ice may be as thick as ever, but I have no longer the means of deter- mining its thickness. The ice is so transparent that it is too much like walking on water by faith. The portion of the pond which was last frozen is a thinner and darker ice stretching about across the mid- dle from southeast to northwest, 7. e. from the shoulder of the Deep Cove to nearly midway between the bar and Ice-Fort Cove Cape. Close to the northwest end of this, there is a small and narrow place twenty feet long east and west, which is still so thin that a small stone makes a hole. The water, judging from my map, may|be] seventy or seventy-five feet deep there. It looks as if that had been the warmest place in the sur- face of the pond and therefore the last to yield to the frost king. Into this, or into the thinner ice at this point, there empties, as it were, a narrow meandering creek from near the western shore, which was nearly as late to freeze as any part. All this, [ think, I have noticed in previous years. About the edge of all this more recent and darker ice, the thicker ice is white with a feathery frost, which seems to have been pro- duced by the very fine spray, or rather the vapor, blown from the yet unfrozen surface on to the ice by the strong and cold wind. Here is where, so to speak, its last animal heat escaped, the dying breath of the pond frozen on its lips. It had the same origin with the frost about the mouth of a hole in the ground whence warm vapors had escaped. The fluid, timid pond was encircled within an ever-narrowing circle by the icy grasp of winter, and this is a trace of the last vaporous breath that curled along its trembling surface. Here the chilled pond gave up the ghost. As I stand here, I hear the hooting of my old ac- quaintance the owl in Wheeler’s Wood. Do I not often- est hear it just before sundown? ‘This sound, heard near at hand, is more simply animal and guttural, without resonance or reverberation, but, heard here from out the depths of the wood, it sounds peculiarly hollow and drum-like, as if it struck on a tense skin drawn around, the tympanum of the wood, through which all we denizens of nature hear. Thus it comes to us an accredited and universal or melodious sound; is more than the voice of the owl, the voice of the wood as well. The owl only touches the stops, or rather wakes the reverberations. For all Nature is a musical instrument on which her creatures play, celebrating their joy or grief unconsciously often. It sounds now, hoo | hoo hoo (very fast) | hoo-rer | hoo.

Rain more or less all day.

Sunday. ‘Think what a pitiful kind of life ours is, eating our kindred animals! and in some places one another! Some of us (the Esquimaux), half whose life is spent in the dark, wholly dependent on one or two animals not many degrees removed from them- selves for food, clothing, and fuel, and partly for shelter; making their sledges “of small fragments of porous bones [of whale],' admirably knit together by thongs of hide’”’ (Kane’s last book, vol. 1, page 205), thus getting about, sliding about, on the bones of our cousins. Where Kane wintered in the Advance in 1853-54, on the coast of Greenland, about 784° north latitude, or further north than any navigator had been excepting Parry at Spitzbergen, he meets with Esquimaux, and “the fleam-shaped tips of their lances were of unmis- takable steel.” “The metal was obtained in traffic from the more southern tribes.” Such is trade. P. M. — To Walden. The pond is open again im the middle, owing to the rain of yesterday. I go across to the cliffs by way of the Andromeda Ponds. How interesting and wholesome their color now! A broad level thick stuff, without a crevice in it, com- posed of the dull brown-red andromeda. Is it not the most uniform and deepest red that covers a large surface now? No withered oak leaves are nearly as red at pre- sent. In a broad hollow amid the hills, you have this perfectly level red stuff, marked here and there only with gray streaks or patches of bare high blueberry bushes, etc., and all surrounded by a light border of straw-colored sedge, etc. Even the little red buds of the Vaccinium Pennsyl- vanicum and vacillans on the now bare and dry-looking stems attract me as I go through the open glades be- tween the first Andromeda Pond and the Well Meadow Field. Many twigs of the Vaccinvuwm vacillans appear to have been nibbled off, and some of its buds have unfolded, apparently in the fall. I observe sage willows with many leaves on them still.