This month has been windy and cold.

March 13. 

Thermometer this morning, about 7 A. M., 2°, and the same yesterday. 

This month has been windy and cold, a succession of snows one or two inches deep, soon going off, the spring birds all driven off. It is in strong contrast with the last month. 

Captain E. P. Dorr of Buffalo tells me that there is a rise and fall daily of the lakes about two or three inches, not accounted for. A difference between the lakes and sea is that when there is no wind the former are quite smooth, no swell. Otherwise he thought that no one could tell whether he was on the lakes or the ocean. 

Described the diver’s descending one hundred and sixty-eight feet to a sunken steamer and getting up the safe after she had been sunk three years. De scribed the breeding of the capelin at Labrador, a small fish about as big as a sardine. They crowd along the shore in such numbers that he had seen a cartload crowded quite on to the shore high and dry by those in the rear. ' 

Elliott, the botanist, says (page 184) that the Lechea villosa (major of Michaux), “if kept from running to seed, would probably form a very neat edging for the beds of a flower garden; the foliage of the radical branches is very handsome during the winter, and the size of the plant is well suited to such a purpose.” 

Rhus Toxicodendron (page 363): “The juice which exudes on plucking the leaf-stalks from the stem of the R. radicans is a good indelible dye for marking linen or cotton.”. 

Of the Drosera rotundzfolia (page 375), “This fluid never appears to fall from the hairs, but is secreted nearly in proportion to its evaporation, and the secre tion is supposed to be greatest in dry clear weather,” hence called sundew. 

Howitt, in his “ Boy’s Adventures in Australia,” says, “People here thought they had discovered large numbers of the graves of the blacks, lying lengthways, as amongst the whites, but these have turned out to be a natural phenomenon, and called Dead Men’s Graves.” The natives generally bury — when they do not burn — in a sitting posture. Is the country cold enough to allow these mounds to have been made by the ice?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, March 13, 1857

This month has been windy and cold, a succession of snows one or two inches deep, soon going off, the spring birds all driven off. It is in strong contrast with the last month. See February 18, 1857 ("The snow is nearly all gone, and it is so warm and springlike that I walk over to the hill, listening for spring birds."); March 5, 1857 ("This and the last four or five days very gusty. Most of the warmth of the fire is carried off by the draught, which consumes the wood very fast, faster than a much colder but still day in winter.") See also  March 15, 1853 ("I have not taken a more blustering walk this past winter than this afternoon."); March 28, 1854 ("Coldest day for a month or more, — severe as almost any in the winter."); March 28, 1855 ("I run about these cold and blustering days, on the whole perhaps the worst to bear in the year, . . . As for the singing of birds, — the few that have come to us, — it is too cold for them to sing and for me to hear. "); March 12, 1856 (" If the present cold should continue uninterrupted a thousand years would not the pond become solid?"); March 8, 1860 ("Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is elsewhere. ")