I hear the boots of passing travellers squeak.

January 9.

Clear, cold morning. 

Smith’s thermometer - 16°; ours - 14° at breakfast time, - 6° at 9 A. M. 

3 P. M. —To Beck Stow’s. 

The thermometer at + 2°. When I return at 4.30, it is at - 2°. 

Probably it has been below zero far the greater part of the day. 

I meet choppers, apparently coming home early on account of the cold. 

I wade through the swamp, where the snow lies light eighteen inches deep on a level, a few leaves of andromedas, etc., peeping out. (I am a-birds’-nesting.) 

The mice have been out and run over it. I see one large bush of winter-berries still quite showy, though somewhat discolored by the cold. The rabbits have run in paths about the swamp. Go now anywhere in the swamp and fear no water. 

The fisherman whom I saw on Walden last night will find his lines well frozen in this morning. 

In passing through the deep cut on the new Bedford road, I saw that a little sand, which was pretty coarse, almost gravel, had fallen from the bank, and was blown over the snow, here and there. The surface of the snow was diversified by those slight drifts, or perhaps cliffs, which are left a few inches high (like the fracture of slate rocks), with a waved outline, and all the sand was collected in waving lines just on the edge of these little drifts, in ridges, maybe an eighth of an inch high. This may help decide how those drifts or cliffs (?) are formed. (Yet when it blows and drifts again it presents a similar appearance.)

It has not been so cold throughout the day, before, this winter. I hear the boots of passing travellers squeak.

H. D. Thoreau,  Journal, January 9, 1856


Clear, cold morning.Probably it has been below zero for the greater part of the day. See January 7, 1856 ("At breakfast time the thermometer stood at - 12°. Earlier it was probably much lower. Smith’s was at -24° early this morning."); January 10, 1856 ("The weather has considerably moderated; - 2° at breakfast time (it was — 8° at seven last evening); but this has been the coldest night probably.");  January 25, 1856 ("The hardest day to bear that we have had, for, beside being 5° at noon and at 4 P. M., there is a strong northwest wind. It is worse than when the thermometer was at zero all day. ")/ See also January 23, 1857 ("The coldest day that I remember recording . . .I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature to-day . . "); January 26, 1857 ("Another cold morning. None looked early, but about eight it was -14°");