The sky overcast with wet-looking clouds.

April 27.

I hear the prolonged che che che che che, etc., of the chip-bird this morning as I go down the street. 

It is a true April morning with east wind, the sky overcast with wet-looking clouds, and already some drops have fallen. It will surely rain to-day, but when it will begin in earnest and how long it will last, none can tell. 

The gardener makes haste to get in his peas, getting his son to drop them. He who requires fair weather puts off his enterprises and resumes them in his mind many times in the forenoon, as the clouds fall lower and sprinkle the fields, or lift higher and show light streaks. He goes half a mile and is overtaken by thick sprinkling drops, falling faster and faster. He pauses and says to himself, this may be merely a shower, which will soon be over, or it may come to a steady rain and last all day. He goes a few steps further, thinking over the condition of a wet man, and then returns. Again it holds up and he regrets that he had not persevered; but the next hour it is stiller and darker, with mist beneath the investing cloud, and then commences a gentle, deliberate rain, which will probably last all day. So he puts on patience and the house. 

I dig up those reddish-brown dor-bugs in the garden. They stir a little. 

Ricketson frequents his shanty by day and evening as much as his house, but does not sleep there, partly on account of his fear of lightning, which he cannot overcome. His timidity in this respect amounts to an idiosyncrasy. I was awaked there in a thunder-storm at midnight by Ricketson rushing about the house, calling to his sons to come down out of the attic where they slept and bolting in to leave a light in my room. His fear of death is equally singular. The thought of it troubles him more perhaps than anything else. He says that he knows nothing about another life, he would like to stay here always. He does not know what to think of the Creator that made the lightning and established death.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 27, 1857


I hear the prolonged che che che che che, etc., of the chip-bird. See April 27, 1852 (“Heard also a chipping sparrow (F. socialis)”); April 12, 1858 ("Hear the huckleberry-bird and, I think, the Fringilla socialis.”).  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Chipping Sparrow (Fringilla socialis ).