8 February 1858 – 14 February 1858

P. M.— To Walden and Goose Pond. The ground is so completely bare this winter, and therefore the leaves in the woods so dry, that on the 5th there was a fire in the woods by Walden (Wheeler’s), and two or three acres were burned over, set probably by the engine. Such a burning as commonly occurs in the spring. The ice which J. Brown is now getting for his ice- house from 8. Barrett’s is from eight to nine plus inches thick, but I am surprised to find that Walden ice is only six inches thick, or even a little less, and it has not been thicker. You can almost drive an axe through it at one blow. In many places about the shore it is open a dozen feet wide, as when it begins to break up in the spring. I observe, as usual, the shore heaved up near where my house was. It is evidently the result of its thawing. It is lifted up with an abrupt, nearly perpendicular edge nearly a foot high (but looks as if it had been crowded up by the ice), while the part under water probably has not been frozen, or has not been thawed. But in the water close to the shore I observe singular dimples in the sand, sometimes perfectly circular tun- nels, etc., as if a stone had been turned round and round and then lifted out. Perhaps this ridge thus lifted up remains somewhat loose through the summer, not fall- ing entirely back, and the next winter, therefore, freezes yet deeper and is heaved up yet higher, and so gains a little from year to year. Thus a pond may create a barrier for itself along an adjacent meadow. When it thus lifts up the shore, it lifts the trees with it, and they are upset. At Little Goose Pond, where I am surprised to find the ice no thicker than at Walden, I raked in the middle and brought up the branches of white pines two inches thick, but perfectly sound, four rods or more from the shore. The wood has been cut about seventeen years on one side, and at least twelve or fourteen on the other, and the present growth is oak. These were the tops of pines that formerly fell into the pond. They would long since [have] decayed on land. I walked about Goose Pond, looking for the large blueberry bushes. I see many which have thirty rings of annual growth. These grow quite on the edge, where they have escaped being cut with the wood, and have all the appearance of age, gray and covered with lichens, commonly crooked, zigzag, and intertwisted with their neighbors, — so that when you have cut one off it is hard to extract it, —— and bending over nearly to the ice, with lusty young shoots running up straight by their sides. I cut one, which measured eight and a half inches in circumference at the butt, and I counted pretty accurately forty-two rings. From another I cut a straight and sound club, four feet long and six and a half inches in circumference at the small end. It is a heavy and close-grained wood. This is the largest of the Vacciniee which grows here, or is described in Gray’s Botany. Some may have borne fruit before I was born, or forty and odd years ago. Older than my cultivated fruit trees. Nobody could tell me what kind of wood it was. The biggest panicled andromeda that I saw thereabouts was only a little more than an inch in diameter and apparently not half as old. It has a much more yellow wood, with a twist to its grain. | Mrs. Monroe says that her mother respected my grandfather very much, because he was a religious man. She remembers his calling one day and inquiring where blue vervain grew, which he wanted, to make a syrup for his cough, and she, a girl, happening to know, ran and gathered some.

A. M. — To old Hunt house with Thatcher. The stairs of the old back part are white pine orspruce, each the half of a square log; those of the cellar in front, oak, of the same form. There is no ridge-pole whatever, —not even a board, — but a steep roof; and some of the rafters are oak saplings, hewn and showing a good deal of bark, and scarcely three inches diameter at the small end; yet they have sufficed. Saw at Simon Brown’s a sketch, apparently made with a pen, on which was written, “Concord Jail, near Boston America,”’ and on a fresher piece of paper on which the above was pasted, was written, “The jail in which General Sir Arch’? Campbell & Wilson were confined when taken off Boston in Amer- ica by a French Privateer.” A letter on the back side, from Mr. Lewis of Framingham to Mr. Brown, stated that he, Lewis, had received the sketch from the grand- son of Wilson, who drew it. You are supposed to be in the jail-yard, or close to it westward, and see the old jail, gambrel-roofed, the old Hurd house (partly) west of the graveyard, the graveyard, and Dr. Hurd house, and, over the last and to the north of it, a wooded hill, apparently Wind- mill Hill, and just north of the Hurd house, beyond it, apparently the court-house and schoolhouse, each with belfries, and the road to the Battle-Ground, and a distant farmhouse on a hill, French’s or Buttrick’s, perhaps. Begins to snow at noon, and about one inch falls, whitening the ground.

Grows cold toward night, and windy.

At 3 p. M. it is 11° and windy. I think it is the coldest day of this winter. The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time. P. M. — To Hill. The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen, but I see none burst. They are very tightly filled and smooth, apparently stretched. The leaves of the round-leaved pyrola, so exposed this winter, look not only dark but as if frozen. I am not sure that they are stiffened however.’ I see that the hemlock leaves also have this frozen or frozen- thawed, cadaverous look, dark and slightly imbrowned, especially the most exposed twigs, while some sheltered ones are still a bright green. The same is the case even with the white pines and, as far as I observe, other evergreens. There is a change in their leaves with cold weather, corresponding to the reddening and darken- ing of checkerberry and pyrola leaves. They change, though they do not fall, and are to some extent affected, even as those trees which, like the oaks, retain a part of their leaves during the winter in a withered state; z. @., they have begun to wither or be killed. I have often before noticed that the pines, when cold weather came, were of a darker and duller green, somewhat like a frozen apple. In the hemlock, at least, there is a positive tendency to redness. ‘The evergreens, then, though they do not fall the first year, lose their origi- nal summer greenness; they are changed and partially killed by the cold, like pyrola and checkerberry and lambkill, and even, in a degree, like oak leaves. Per- haps the pitch pine is the least affected. Cut a club of celtis wood. It is hard but, I think, brittle. The celastrus (waxwork) is a soft, spongy, and flexible wood, though of very slow growth. You can easily sink your knife into it. I count twenty-five rings in the heart-wood of one which is not quite an inch in diameter. In the sap there is no evidence of rings at all.

Colder than yesterday morning; perhaps the coldest of the winter. P. M. — To Ledum Pond. Those small holes in the ground, — musquash, mice, etc., — thickly beset with crystals of frost, re- mind me of the invisible vapor issuing thence which may be called Earth’s breath, though you might think it were the breath of a mouse. In cold weather you see not only men’s beards and the hair about the muzzles of oxen whitened with their frozen breath, but countless holes in the banks, which are the nostrils of the earth, white with the frozen earth’s breath.

Last night said to have been a little colder than the night before, and the coldest hitherto. P. M. — Ride to Cafferty’s Swamp. The greatest breadth of the swamp appears to be northeasterly from Adams’s. There is much panicled andromeda in it, some twelve feet high, and, as I count, seventeen years old, with yellowish wood. I saw three tupelos in the swamp, each about one foot in diameter and all within two rods. In those parts of the swamp where the bushes were not so high but that I could look over them, I observed that the swamp was variously shaded, or painted even, like a rug, with the sober colors running gradually into each other, by the colored recent shoots of various shrubs which grow densely, as the red blueberry, and the yellowish-brown panicled andromeda, and the dark-brown or blackish Prinos verticillatus, and the choke-berry, etc. Standing on a level with those shrubs, you could see that these colors were only a foot or so deep, according to the length of the shoots. So, too, oftener would the forests appear if we oftener stood above them. How often vegetation is either yellow or red! as the buds of the swamp-pink, the leaves of the pitcher-plant, etc., etc., and to-day I notice yellow-green recent shoots of high blueberry. Observed a coarse, dense-headed grass in the meadow at Stow’s old swamp lot. What did the birds do for horsehair here formerly ?

About one inch of snow falls.