P. M. – Ride to limestone quarries on old Carlisle road with E. Hoar.
This morning it was considerably colder than for a long time, and by noon very much colder than heretofore, with a pretty strong northerly wind. The principal flight of geese was November 8th, so that the bulk of them preceded this cold turn five days.
You need greatcoat and buffalo and gloves now, if you ride. I find my hands stiffened and involuntarily finding their way to my pockets. No wonder that the weather is a standing subject of conversation, since we are so sensitive.
If we had not gone through several winters, we might well be alarmed at the approach of cold weather. With this keener blast from the north, my hands suddenly fail to fulfill their office, as it were begin to die. We must put on armor against the new foe. I am almost world-ridden suddenly. I can hardly tie and untie my shoe-strings.
What a story to tell an inhabitant of the tropics, – perchance that you went to walk, after many months of warmth, when suddenly the air became so cold and hostile to your nature, that it benumbed you so that you lost the use of some of your limbs, could not untie your shoe-strings or unbutton your clothes!
This cold weather makes us step more briskly.
I hear that the Indians say we are to have a hard winter, because of the abundance of acorns, also because of the unusual thickening of corn-husks in the summer!
The stone at those quarries strikes northeasterly and southwesterly, or apparently with the rocks of Curly-pate, a third of a mile off. The strata appear to be nearly vertical. In the most southwesterly quarry, I noticed in the side of an upright sliver of rock, where the limestone had formerly been blasted off, the bottom of the nearly perpendicular hole which had been drilled for that purpose, two or three inches deep and about two and a half feet from the ground.
In this I found two fresh chestnuts, a dozen or more amphicarpaea seeds, as many apparently either prinos (?) or rose (?) seeds (single seeds and fresh), and several fresh barberry seeds mixed with a little earth and rubbish.
What placed them there? Squirrel, mouse, jay, or crow? At first I thought that a quadruped could hardly have reached this hole, but probably it could easily, and it was a very cunning place for such a deposit. I brought them all home in order to ascertain what the seeds were and how they came there.
Examining the chestnuts carefully in the evening and wondering if so small a bird as a chickadee could transport one, I observed near the larger end of one some very fine scratches, which it seemed to me might have been made by the teeth of a very small animal when carrying it, but certainly not by the bill of a bird, since they had pricked sharply into the shell, rucking it up one way. I then looked to see where the teeth of the other jaw had scratched it, but could discover no marks and was therefore still somewhat in doubt.
Coming up-stairs an hour afterward, I examined those scratches with a microscope, and saw plainly that they had been made by some fine and sharp cutting instrument like a fine chisel, a little concave, and had plowed under the surface of the shell a little, toward the big end of the nut, raising it up; and, looking farther, I now discovered, on the larger end of the nut, at least two corresponding marks made by the lower incisors, plowing toward the first and about a quarter of an inch distant. These were a little less obvious to the unarmed eye, but no less plain through the glass.
I now had no doubt that they were made by the incisors of a mouse, and, comparing them with the incisors of a deer mouse (Musleucopus) whose skull I have, I found that one or two of the marks were just the width of its two incisors combined (a twentieth of an inch), and the others, though finer, might have been made by them. On one side, at least, it had taken fresh hold once or twice. I have but little doubt that these seeds were placed there by a Musleucopus, our most common wood mouse.
The other nut, which had no marks on it, I suppose was carried by the star end, which was gone from both. There was no chestnut tree within twenty rods. These seeds thus placed in this recess will account for chestnut trees, barberry bushes, etc., etc., growing in chinks and clefts where we do not see how the seeds could have fallen. There was earth enough even in this little hole to keep some very small plant alive.
I hear that Gardiner Heywood caught a trout in Walden Pond the other day and that it weighed five pounds. [And a little over. Speared it about a week ago, and saw another not quite so large. Henry and John Bigelow put a couple into the pond some ten years ago. Were these the ones?]
It seems that the Abel Davis who caught the pickerel in Temple Brook, which would make such a meal for his “Lavinia” and himself, was addicted to talking to himself, thinking aloud. He was once talked of for captain of the company, and about that time, they say, was overheard saying to himself, “Captain Abel Davis! What a fine-looking man!”
Can those straight ridges running north by west and south by east over the most level part of Curly-pate have anything to do with diluvial furrows?
Returning along the edge of Calla Swamp, under the fern-clad hill, I feel the crunching sound of frost-crystals in the heaving mud under my feet, and see and feel the sphagnum already stiffened into a crust, and what probably in the forenoon was water trickling from a fern-clad rock is now half a dozen icicles, six or eight inches long.
Such is the first freezing day. Such phenomena are first observed under the north side of a hill in a cold swamp like this. Such are the first advances of winter. Ice-crystals shoot in the mud, the sphagnum becomes a stiffened mass, and dropping water in these cold places, a rigid icicle.
E. Hoar tells me that his partner, having a new adobe house, or perhaps roof to it, built in Santa Barbara, on the California coast, corrected the bad levelling of his carpenters by taking such a position as to make the ridge-pole coincide with the horizon line where the Pacific appeared to meet the sky.
The thermometer is 27° at 6 P. M. The mud in the street is stiffened under my feet this evening.
Where there is a wall near a pitch pine wood, I see the scales of the cones which the squirrels have carried to the wall and stripped, strewn all along the wall on the ground.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 14, 1857
The crunching sound of frost-crystals under my feet, such is the first freezing day. See November 14, 1858 ("It is all at once perfect winter. I walk on frozen ground two thirds covered with a sugaring of dry snow.")
This cold weather makes us step more briskly. See November 12, 1858 ("All people move the brisker for the cold, yet are braced and a little elated by it. They love to say, “Cold day, sir.” Though the days are shorter, you get more work out of a hired man than before, for he must work to keep warm. ")
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