Feather frost

February 14.

Another rather warm morning, still more overcast than yesterday’s. There is also another leaf or feather frost on the trees, weeds, and rails, — slight leaves or feathers, a quarter to a half inch long by an eighth wide, standing out around the slightest core. I think it is owing to the warmer nights. At nine last evening and at nine this morning, the thermometer stood at 20°. These ghosts of trees are very handsome and fairy-like.

Aunt Louisa says that her cousin Nahum Jones, son to that Nathan whom her mother and sisters visited with her down east, carried a cat to the West Indies, sold his vessel there; and though the same vessel did not return, and he came back in another vessel without the cat, the cat got home to Gouldsboro somehow, unaccountably, about the same time that he did. Captain Woodard told her that he carried the same cat three times round the world.

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