13 December 1858 – 19 December 1858

P. M. — To Walden. There is a fine mizzling rain, which rests in small drops on your coat, but on most surfaces is turning to a glaze. Yet it is not cold enough for gloves even, and I think that the freezing may be owing to the fineness of the rain, and that, if it should rain much harder, even though it were colder, it would not freeze to what it fell on. It freezes on the railroad rails when it does not on the wooden sleepers. Already I begin to see, on the storm side of every twig and culm, a white glaze (re- flecting the snow or sky), rhyming with the vegetable core. And on those fine grass heads which are bent over in the path the fine dew-like drops are frozen sep- arately like a string of beads, being not yet run together. There is little if any wind, and the fine rain is visible only against a dark ground. There is not so much ice in Walden as on the 11th. A damp day brings out the color of oak leaves, some- what as of lichens. They are of a brighter and deeper leather-color, richer and more wholesome, hanging more straightly down than ever. They look peculiarly clean and wholesome, their tints brought out and their lobes more flattened out, and they show to great ad- vantage, these trees hanging still with leather-colored leaves in this mizzling rain, seen against the misty sky. They are again as it were full-veined with some kind of brown sap.

I see at Derby’s shop a barred owl (Strix nebulosa), taken in the woods west of the factory on the 11th, found (with its wing broke [szc]) by a wood- chopper. It measures about three and a half feet in alar extent by eighteen to twenty inches long, or nearly the same as the cat owl, but is small and without horns. It is very mild and quiet, bears handling perfectly well, and only snaps its bill with a loud sound at the sight of a cat or dog. It is apparently a female, since it is large and has white spots on the wings. ‘The claws are quite dark rather than dark horn-color. It hopped into the basin of the scales, and I was surprised to find that it weighed only one pound and one ounce. It may be thin-fleshed on account of its broken wing, but how light-bodied these fliers are! It has no yellow iris like the cat owl, and has the bristles about its yellow bill which the other has not. It has a very smooth and handsome round head, a brownish gray. Solemnity is what they express, — fit representatives of the night.

P. M. — To Walden. The pond is merely frozen a little about the edges. I see various little fishes lurking under this thin, trans- parent ice, close up to the edge or shore, especially where the shore is flat and water shoal. They are little shiners! with the dark longitudinal stripe, about an inch and a half long, perch, and one pickerel about a foot long. They are all a peculiar rich-brown color seen thus 1 ? 2? Vide 25th.