30 March 1857 – 5 April 1857

A very pleasant day. Spent a part of it in the garden preparing to set out fruit trees. It is agreeable once more to put a spade into the warm mould. The victory is ours at last, for we remain and take possession of the field. .In this climate, in which we do not commonly bury our dead in the winter on account of the frozen ground, and find ourselves ex- posed on a hard bleak crust, the coming out of the frost and the first turning up of the soil with a spade or plow is an event of importance. P. M. — To Hill. { As I rise the east side of the Hill, I hear the distant faint peep of hylodes and the tut tut of croaking frogs from the west of the Hill. How gradually and imper- ceptibly the peep of the hylodes mingles with and swells the volume of sound which makes the voice of awakening nature! If you do not listen carefully for its first note, you probably will not hear it, and, not having heard that, your ears become used to the sound, so that you will hardly notice it at last, however loud and universal. I hear it now faintly from through and over the bare gray twigs and the sheeny needles of an oak and pine wood and from over the russet fields beyond, and it is so intimately mingled with the mur- mur or roar of the wind as to be well-nigh inseparable from it. It leaves such a lasting trace on the ear’s memory that often I think I hear their peeping when I do not. It is a singularly emphatic and ear-piercing proclamation of animal life, when with a very few and slight exceptions vegetation is yet dormant. The dry croaking and tué tut of the frogs (a sound which ducks seem to imitate, a kind of quacking, — and they are both of the water!) is plainly enough down there in some pool in the woods, but the shrill peeping of the hylodes locates itself nowhere in particular, but seems to take its rise at an indefinite distance over wood and hill and pasture, from clefts or hollows in the March wind. It is a wind-born sound.! To-day both croakers and peepers are pretty numer- ously heard, and I hear one faint stertorous (bullfrog- like ??) sound on the river meadow. What an important part to us the little peeping hylodes acts, filling all our ears with sound in the spring afternoons and evenings, while the existence of the otter, our largest wild animal, is not betrayed to any of our senses (or at least not to more than one in a thou- sand)! The voice of the peepers is not so much of the earth earthy as of the air airy. It rises at once on the wind and is at home there, and we are incapable of tracing it further back. The earliest gooseberry in the garden begins to show a little green near at hand. An Irishman is digging a ditch for a foundation wall to a new shop where James Adams’s shop stood. He tells me that he dug up three cannon-balls just in the rear of the shop lying within a foot of each other and about eighteen inches beneath the surface. I saw one of them, which was about three and a half inches in diameter and somewhat eaten with rust on one side. These were probably thrown into the pond by the British on the 19th of April, 1775. Shattuck says that five hundred pounds of balls were thrown into the pond and wells. These may have been dropped out the back window. The tortoises now quite commonly he out sunning on the sedge or the bank. As you float gently down the stream, you hear a slight rustling and, looking up, see the dark shining back of a picta sliding off some little bed of straw-colored coarse sedge which is upheld by the button-bushes or willows above the surrounding water. ‘They are very wary and, as I go up the Assabet, will come rolling and sliding down a rod or two, though they appear to have but just climbed up to that height.

8 a. mM. — Up Assabet. See an Emys guttata sunning on the bank. I had forgotten whether I ever saw it in this river. Hear a pheebe, and this morning the tree sparrows sing very sweetly about Keyes’s arbor-vite and Cheney’s pines and apple trees. Crow blackbirds. I think it must have been these I saw the 29th of March. Checker- berries very fair and abundant now near Muhlenbergii Brook, contrasting with the red-brown leaves. They are not commonly touched by the frost. I see children picking spring cranberries in the meadows. It is a true April evening, feeling and looking as if it would [rain], and already I hear a robin or two singing their evening song.

Go to New Bedford. A great change in the weather. I set out apple trees yesterday, but in the night it was very cold, with snow, which is now several inches deep. On the sidewalk in Cambridge I see a toad, which apparently hopped out from under a fence last evening, frozen quite hard in a sitting posture. Carried it into Boston in my pocket, but could not thaw it into life. The other day as I came to the front of the house I caught sight of a genuine wayfaring man, an oldish countryman, with a frock and a bundle strapped to his back, who was speaking to the butcher, just then driving off in his cart. He was a gaunt man with a flashing eye, as if half crazy with travel, and was complaining, “You see it shakes me so, I would rather travel the common road.”’ I supposed that he referred to the rail- road, which the butcher had recommended for shortness. I was touched with compassion on observing the butcher’s apparent indifference, as, jumping to his seat, he drove away before the traveller had finished his sentence, and the latter fell at once into the regular wayfarer’s gait, bending under his pack and holding the middle of the road with a teetering gait. On my way to New Bedford, see within a couple of rods of the railroad, in some country town, a boy’s box trap set for some muskrat or mink by the side of a little pond. The lid was raised, and I could see the bait on its point. A black snake was seen yesterday in the Quaker burying-ground here.

In Ricketson’s shanty. R. has seen white- bellied swallows more than a week. I walk down the side of the river and see Walton’s ice-boat left on the bank. Hear R. describing to Alcott his bachelor uncle James Thornton. When he awakes in the morning he lights the fire in his stove (all prepared) with a match on the end of a stick, without getting up. When he gets up he first attends to his ablutions, being personally very clean, cuts off a head of tobacco to clean his teeth with, eats a hearty breakfast, sometimes, it was said, even buttering his sausages. Then he goes to a rela- tive’s store and reads the Tribune till dinner, sitting in a corner with his back to those who enter. Goes ' to his boarding-house and dines, eats an apple or two, and then in the afternoon frequently goes about the solution of some mathematical problem (having once been a schoolmaster), which often employs him a week.

Saturday. Walk down the shore of the river. A Dutchman pushes out in his skiff after qua- hogs. He also took his eel-spear, thinking to try for eels if he could not get quahogs, for, owing to the late cold weather, they might still be buried in the mud. I saw him raking up the quahogs on the flats at high (?) tide, in two or three feet of water. He used a sort of coarse, long-pronged hoe. Keeps anchoring on the flats and searches for a clam on the bottom with his eye, then rakes it up and picks it off his rake. Am not sure what kind of large gulls I see there, some more white, some darker, methinks, than the herring gull. R. tells me that he found dead in his piazza the south side of his house, the 23d of last January, the snow being very deep and the thermometer — 12° at sunrise, a warbler, which he sent to Brewer. I read Brewer’s note to him, in which he said that he took it to be the Sylvicola coronata and would give it to the Natural History Society, thinking it remarkable that it was found at that time. B. says that he discovered “for the first time its nest in the heart of Nova Scotia near Parrs- boro mountains [I think last season].’ It was the only new egg of that trip. Yet I felt well repaid, for ‘no other white man had ever before seen that egg to know it,’ as Audubon says of another species.” Caught a croaking frog in some smooth water in the railroad gutter. Above it was a uniform (perhaps olive ?) brown, without green, and a yellowish line along the edge of the lower jaws. It was, methinks, larger than a common Rana palustris. Near by was its spawn, in very handsome spherical masses of transparent jelly, two and a half to three inches in diameter, suspended near the surface of some weed, as goldenrod or aster, and consisting of globules about a third of an inch in diameter, with a black or dark centre as big as a large shot. Only these black centres were visible at a little distance in the water, and so much the more surprising and interesting is the translucent jelly when you lift it to the light. It even suggested the addition of cream and sugar, for the table. Yet this pool must have been frozen over last night! What frog can it be? ? ' April 5. Sunday. Arthur R. has been decking a new Vineyard boat which he has bought, and making a curb about the open part. P. M. — Walked round by the ruins of the factory. See in many places the withered leaves of the aletris in , \ rather low ground, about the still standing withered stems. It was well called husk-root by the squaw. Arthur says that he just counted, at 9.30 p. M., twenty toads that had hopped out from under the wall on to the sidewalk near the house. ‘This, then, is appar- ently the way with the toads. They very early hop out from under walls on to sidewalks in the warmer nights, long before they are heard to ring, and are often frozen and then crushed there. Probably single ones ring earlier than I supposed. I hear the croaking frogs at 9.30 p. M., also the speed speed over R.’s meadow, which I once referred to the snipe, but R. says is the woodcock, whose other strain he has al- ready heard.