Speed perspective

January 14. 

Skate to Baker Farm with a rapidity which astonished myself, before the wind, feeling the rise and fall, — the water having settled in the suddenly cold night,—which I had not time to see. 

(See the intestines of (apparently) a rabbit, --betrayed by a morsel of fur  left on the ice -- probably the prey of a fox.) 

A man feels like a new creature, a deer, perhaps, moving at this rate. He takes new possession of nature in the name of his own majesty. There was I, and there, and there. I judged that in a quarter of an hour I was three and a half miles from home without having made any particular exertion.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 14, 1855

Skate with a rapidity which astonished myself. See January 15, 1855 (“Skate into a crack, and slide on my side twenty-five feet.”)