21 February 1859 – 27 February 1859

Go to Worcester to lecture in a parlor.

P. M.— Walk to Quinsigamond Pond, where was good skating yesterday, but this very pleasant and warm day it is suddenly quite too soft. I was just saying to Blake that I should look for hard ice in the shade, or [on the] north side, of some wooded hill close to the shore, though skating was out of the question elsewhere, when, looking up, I saw a gentleman and lady very gracefully gyrating and, as it were, courtesying to each other in a small bay under such a hill on the opposite shore of the pond. Intervening bushes and shore concealed the ice, so that their swift and graceful motions, their bodies inclined at various angles as they gyrated forward and backward about a small space, looking as if they would hit each other, reminded me of the circling of two winged insects in the air, or hawks receding and approaching. I first hear and then see eight or ten bluebirds go- ing over. Perhaps they have not reached Concord yet. One boy tells me that he saw a bluebird in Concord on Sunday, the 20th.’ I see, just caught in the pond, a brook pickerel which, though it has no transverse bars, but a much finer and slighter reticulation than the common, is very distinct from it in the length and form of the snout. This is much shorter and broader as you look down on it, thus: In Bell Pond piook common (Once Bladder Pond) on the same road, near to Worcester, they were catching little shiners, only, at most, two inches long, for perch bait. (The perch and pick- erel they commonly catch at Quinsiga- mond are small.) They cut a round hole about three feet in diameter and let down a simple net of this form, pz. with only a stone to sink it in the bot- tom, then cast Indian meal or bits of cracker into the water, and the minnows swim forward after the bait, and the fisherman, without seeing them, pulls up the net at a venture.

Heard Staples, Tuttle, E. Wood, N. Bar- rett, and others this morning at the post-office talking about the profit of milk-farming. The general conclu- sion seemed to be that it was less profitable than it was three years ago. Yet Staples thought he could name half a dozen who had done well. He named one. He thought he could name eight or ten who had paid off the mortgages on their farms by this means within a few years. Tuttle said he would give him a good sup- per if he would name three. Staples named only the one referred to above, David Buttrick, but he added, looking at Tuttle, “There is yourself. You know you came to town with nothing in your pocket but an old razor, a few pennies, and a damned dull jack-knife, and now you are richer than David Buttrick.” “Well,” an- swered Tuttle, “I shouldn’t have been, if I had n’t used the razor so much.” When it snowed yesterday very large flakes, an inch in diameter, Aunt said, “They are picking geese.” This, it seems, is an old saying. Measure your health by your sympathy with morn- ing and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature, — if the prospect of an early morn- ing walk does not banish sleep, 1f the warble of the first bluebird does not thnill you, — know that the morning and spring of your life are past. ‘Thus may you feel your pulse. I heard this morning a nuthatch on the elms in the street. I think that they are heard oftener and again [sic] at the approach of spring, just as the phebe note of the chickadee is; and so their gnah gnah is a herald of the spring. Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year. P. M. — Up river on ice. I see a handful of the scarlet Rosa Carolina hips in the crotch of a willow on some mud, a foot or more above the ice. They are partly eaten, and I think were placed there by a musquash. The rose bush, with a few hips on it, still stands in the ice within a few feet. Goodwin says he has seen their tracks eight or ten rods long to an apple tree near the water, where they have been for apples.

P.M. — To Cliffs. Though it was a dry, powdery snow-storm yesterday, the sun is now so high that the snow is soft and sticky this afternoon. The sky, too, is soft to look at, and the air to feel on my cheek. Health makes the poet, or sympathy with nature, a good appetite for his food, which is constantly renewing him, whetting his senses. Pay for your victuals, then, with poetry; give back life for life.