14 March 1859 – 20 March 1859

P. M. — To Hunt house. I thought from the above drawing that the original door must have been in the middle of the old part and not at one end, and that I should detect it in the man- ner in which the studs were set in. I really did so and found some other traces of the old door (where I have dotted it) when I got there. Some of the chalk- marks which have been preserved under the casing of the timbers so long have been completely washed off in yesterday’s rain, as the frame stood bare. Also read in chalk on a chamber floor joist (which had been plastered over beneath) “enfine Brown,” so many s. and d., and what most read for “Feb 1666,” but, being written over a rough knot, it is doubtful. “Hides 3.” Saw E. Hosmer take up the cellar stairs. They are of white oak, in form like one F half of a squared ? white ae oak log sawed diagonally. These lie flat on their broadest sides on the slanting earth, resting near each end on a horse, which is a white oak stick with the bark on, hewed on the upper side and sunk in the earth, and they are fastened to this by two pins of wood placed as I have indicated. I judge by my eye that the house is fifteen feet high to the eaves. The posts are remarkably sawn and hewn away on account of the projection of the upper story, so that they are more than twice as large above as below, thus: the corner posts being cut on two sides or more than half away (six inches off them) below the sec- ond story. The chimney was laid m clay. “4. B.” were perhaps the initials of Thomas Brown; also “I. [?] H. D.” The cowslip in pitcher has fairly blossomed to-day. I see a large flock of grackles searching for food along the water’s edge, just below Dr. Bartlett’s. Some wade in the water. They are within a dozen rods of me and the road. It must be something just washed up that they are searching for, for the water has just risen and is still rising fast. Is it not insects and worms washed out of the grass ? and perhaps the snails ? When a grackle sings, it is as if his mouth were © full of cotton, which he was trying to spit out. The river is still rising. It is open [?]and generally over the meadows. ‘The meadow ice is rapidly break- ing up. Great cakes half a dozen rods long are drifted down against the bridges. ‘There is a strong current on the meadow, not only north along the causeway, but south along the north end of the causeway, the water thus rushing both ways toward the only outlet at the bridge. This is proved by great cakes of ice float- ing swiftly along parallel with the causeway, but in opposite directions, to meet at the bridge. They are there soon broken up by the current after they strike the abutments. I see a large cake eight feet wide and ten inches thick, just broken off, carried under the bridge mn a vertical position and wholly under water, such is the pressure there. This shows to what an ex- tent the causeways and bridges act as dams to the flood.

Rainy day and southerly wind. I come home in the evening through a very heavy rain after two brilliant rainbows at sunset, the first of the year.

6 a. M.— The water is just over the slanting iron truss, four feet from its east end, and still rising. | P. M. — Launch my boat and sail to Ball’s Hill. It is fine clear weather and a strong northwest wind. What a change since yesterday! Last night I came home through as incessant heavy rain as I have been out in for many years, through the muddiest and wettest of streets, still partly covered with ice, and the rain- water stood over shoes in many places on the sidewalks. I heard of several who went astray in this water and had adventures in the dark. You require india-rubber boots then. But to-day I see the children playing at hop-scotch on those very sidewalks, with a bed marked in the dry sand. So rapid are the changes of weather with us, and so porous our soil. With a strong wind we sail over the Red Bridge road. The water is falling over the lower side of the road as over a dam. For the road really operates as a dam, the water being much lower on the east side. A new phase of the spring is presented; a new sea- son has come. By the soaking rain and the wind of yesterday especially, the remaining snow and ice has been almost entirely swept away, and the ice has been broken, floated off, and melted, and much frost taken out of the ground; and now, as we glide over the Great Meadows before this strong wind, we no longer see dripping, saturated russet and brown banks through rain, hearing at intervals the alarm notes of the early robins, — banks which reflect a yellowish light, — but we see the bare and now pale-brown and dry russet hills. The earth has cast off her white coat and come forth in her clean-washed sober russet early spring dress. As we look over the lively, tossing blue waves for a mile or more eastward and northward, our eyes fall on these shining russet hills, and Ball’s Hill appears in this strong light at the verge of this undulating blue plain, like some glorious newly created island of the spring, just sprung up from the bottom in the midst of the blue waters. The fawn-colored oak leaves, with a few pines intermixed, thickly covering the hill, look not like a withered vegetation, but an ethereal kind, just expanded and peculiarly adapted to the season and the sky. Look toward the sun, the water is yellow, as water in which the earth has just washed itself clean of its winter impurities; look from the sun and it is a beautiful dark blue; but in each direction the crests of the waves are white, and you cannot sail or row over this watery wilderness without sharing the excitement of this ele- ment. Our sail draws so strongly that we cut through the great waves without feeling them. And all around, half a mile or a mile distant, looking over this blue foreground, I see the bare and peculiarly neat, clean- washed, and bright russet hills reflecting the bright light (after the storm of yesterday) from an infinite number of dry blades of withered grass. The russet “a surfaces have now, as it were, a combed look, — combed by the rain. And the leather-color of withered oak leaves covering Ball’s Hill, seen a mile or two off in the strong light, with a few pines intermixed, as if it were an island rising out of this blue sea in the horizon. This sight affects me as if it were visible at this season only. What witb the clear air and the blue water and the sight of the pure dry withered leaves, that distant hill affects me as something altogether ethereal. After a day of soaking rain, concluded with a double rainbow the evening before, — not to mention the rain of the evening, — go out into the sparkling spring air, embark on the flood of melted snow and of rain gathered from all hillsides, with a northwest wind in which you often find it hard to stand up straight, and toss upon a sea of which one half is liquid clay, the other liquid indigo, and look round on an earth dressed in a home- spun of pale sheeny brown and leather-color. Such are the blessed and fairy isles we sail to! We meet one great gull beating up the course of the river against the wind, at Flint’s Bridge. (One says they were seen about a week ago, but there was very little water then.) Its is a very leisurely sort of limp- ing flight, tacking its way along like a sailing vessel, yet the slow security with which it advances suggests a leisurely contemplativeness in the bird, as if it were working out some problem quite at its leisure. As often as its very narrow, long, and curved wings are lifted up against the light, I see a very narrow distinct light edging to the wing where it is thin. Its black- tipped wings. Afterwards, from Ball’s Hill, looking i 4 JOURNAL {Marcu 16 north, I see two more circling about looking for food over the ice and water. There is an unexpected quantity of ice in that direc- tion, not on the channel, but the meadows east of it, all the way from Ball’s Hill to Carlisle Bridge, — large masses, which have drifted from the channel and from above, for there the wind has blown more directly across the river. These great masses have been driven and wedged one against another, and ground up on the edges. This first sight of the bare tawny and russet earth, seen afar, perhaps, over the meadow flood in the spring, affects me as the first glimpse of land, his native land, does the voyager who has not seen it a long time. But in a week or two we get used to it. I look down over Tarbell’s Bay, just north of Ball’s Hill. Not only meadows but potato and rye fields are buried deep, and you see there, sheltered by the hills on the northwest, a placid blue bay having the russet hills for shores. This kind of bay, or lake, made by the freshet — these deep and narrow “ fiords ” —can only be seen along such a stream as this, liable to an annual freshet. The water rests as gently as a dewdrop on a leaf, Javing its tender temporary shores. It has no strand, leaves no permanent water-mark, but though you look at it a quarter of a mile off, you know that the rising flood is gently overflowing a myriad withered green blades there in succession. There is the magic of lakes that come and go. The lake or bay is not an institution, but a phenomenon. You plainly see that it is so much water poured into the hollows of the earth.

6.30 a. Mm. — River risen still higher. It is seven and a half inches below the highest part of the truss and about fifteen and a half inches below the middle of the lower stone step of the railroad. It is not quite over Wood’s road. I hear a robin fairly singing. A great many musquash have been killed within a week. One says a cartload have been killed in Assa- bet. Perhaps a dozen gunners have been out in this town every day. They get a shilling apiece for their skins. One man getting musquash and one mink eared five or six dollars the other day. I hear their guns early and late long before sunrise and after sun- set, for those are the best times. P. M. — To Flint’s Bridge by water. The water is very high, and smooth as ever it is. It is very warm. I wear but one coat on the water. The town and the land it is built on seem to rise but little above the flood. This bright smooth and level sur- face seems here the prevailing element, as if the dis- tant town were an island. I realize how water pre- dominates on the surface of the globe. J am surprised to see new and unexpected water-lines, drawn by the level edge of the flood about knolls in the meadows and in the woods, — waving lines, rarely if ever recog- nized or thought of by the walker or any, which mark the boundary of a possible or probable freshet any spring.' Even if the highest water-mark were indi- cated at one point, the surveyor could not, with any labor short of infinite, draw these lines for us which wind about every elevation of earth or rock. Yet, though this slight difference of level which the water so simply and effectually points out, is so unobservable by us ordinarily, no doubt Nature never forgets it for a moment, but plants grow and insects, etc., breed in conformity to it. Many a kingdom of nature has its boundaries parallel with this waving line. By these freshets, the relation of some field, usually far from the stream, to future or past deluge is suggested. I am surprised and amused, at least, to walk in such a field and observe the nice distinctions which the great water-level makes there. So plants and animals and thoughts have their commonly unseen shores, and many portions of the earth are, with reference to them, islands or peninsulas or capes, shores or moun- tains. We are stiff and set in our geography because the level of water is comparatively, or within short periods, unchangeable. We look only in the sea for islands and continents and their varieties. But there are more subtle and invisible and fluctuating floods which island this or that part of the earth whose geography has never been mapped. For instance, here is Manta- tuket Rock, commonly a rocky peninsula with a low or swampy neck and all covered with wood. It is now a small rocky island, and not only the swampy neck but a considerable portion of the upland is blotted out by the flood, covered and concealed under water; and what surprises me is that the water should so in- stantly know and select its own shore on the upland, though I could not have told with my eye whether it would be thirty feet this way or as many that. A dis- tinction is made for me by the water in this case which I had never thought of, revealing the relation of this surface to the flood ordinarily far from it, and which I now begin to perceive that every tree and shrub and herbaceous plant growing there knew, if I did not. How different to-day from yesterday! Yesterday was a cool, bright day, the earth just washed bare by the rain, and a strong northwest wind raised respect- able billows on our vernal seas and imparted remark- able life and spirit to the scene. To-day it is perfectly still and warm. Not a ripple disturbs the surface of these lakes, but every insect, every small black beetle struggling on it, is betrayed; but, seen through this air, though many might not notice the difference, the russet surface of the earth does not shine, is not bright. I see no shining russet islands with dry but flushing oak leaves. The air is comparatively dead when I attend to it, and it is as if there were the veil of a fine mist over all objects, dulling their edges. Yet this would be called a clear day. These aerial differences in the days are not commonly appreciated, though they affect our spirits. When I am opposite the end of the willow-row, see- ing the osiers of perhaps two years old all in a mass, they are seen to be very distinctly yellowish beneath and scarlet above. They are fifty rods off. Here is the same chemistry that colors the leaf or fruit, coloring the bark. It is generally, probably always, the upper part of the twig, the more recent growth, that is the higher-colored and more flower or fruit like. So leaves are more ethereal the higher up and further from the root. In the bark of the twigs, indeed, 1s the more per- manent flower or fruit. The flower falls in spring or summer, the fruit and leaves fall or wither in autumn, but the blushing twigs retain their color throughout the winter and appear more brilliant than ever the succeeding spring. They are winter fruit. It adds greatly to the pleasure of late November, of winter, or of early spring walks to look into these mazes of twigs of different colors. . As I float by the Rock, I hear rustling amid the oak leaves above that new water-line, and, there being no wind, I know it to be a striped squirrel, and soon see its long-unseen striped sides flirting about the instep of an oak. Its lateral stripes, alternate black and yel- lowish, are a type which I have not seen for a long time, or rather a punctuation-mark, the character to indi- cate where a new paragraph commences in the revo- lution of the seasons. Double lines. I find by measurement that there is from two to three inches fall in the middle between the piers of Flint’s Bridge, on the two sides of the bridge, suppos- ing the planking to be level; but there is much more close to the abutments, for the water is very conspicu- ously heaped up in the middle in each case, or between each two piers, thus: — es 2 = az. } TE eee If you look from above, it is somewhat thus: — If I land now on [; -any knoll which is left dry above the flood, an island in the meadow, and its surface is broken, I am pretty sure to find Indian relics. They pitched their wigwams on these highest places, near water. I was speaking yesterday of the peculiarity of our meadow-bays in time of flood, —a shore where there are no shore-marks; for in time trees, rocks, etc., ar- range themselves parallel with the water’s edge, and the water by its washing makes for itself a strand, washing out the soil from the bank and leaving the sand and stones, and paths of animals and men con- form to the permanent shore, but in this case all is abrupt and surprising. Rocky islands covered with green lichens and with polypody half submerged rise directly from the water, and trees stand up to their middles in it. Any eye would perceive that a rock cov- ered with green lichens quite down to the water’s edge was something unusual.

8 a. mM. — To stone bridge. The water has fallen three or four inches. It was at its height last night, and was then about five inches below the highest part of the truss. This is quite high water. But it has now begun to rain, and the river will probably rise again.

7 a. m. — Fair weather and a very strong southwest wind, the water not quite so high as day before yesterday, — just about as high as yesterday morning, — notwithstanding yesterday’s rain, which was pretty copious. P. M. — To Tarbell’s via J. P. Brown’s. The wind blows very strongly from the southwest, and, the course of the river being northeast, it must help the water to run off very much. If it blew with rin equal violence from the north, the river would prob- ably have risen on account of yesterday’s rain. On the northeast sides of the broadest expanses the waves run very high, quite sea-like, and their tumult is ex- citing both [to]see and[to]hear. All sorts of lumber is afloat. Rails, planks, and timber, etc., which the un- thrifty neglected to secure now change hands. Much railroad lumber is floated off. While one end rests on the land, it is the railroad’s, but as soon as it is afloat it is made the property of him who saves it. I see some poor neighbors as earnest as the railroad employees are negligent, to secure it. It blows so hard that you walk aslant against the wind. Your very beard, if you wear a full one, is a serious cause of detention. Or if you are fortunate enough to go before the wind, your carriage can hardly be said to be natural to you.

7 a. mM. — River no higher than three days ago, notwithstanding the rain of two days ago, the wind being southwest and very strong.