Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change?

November 28. 

A gray, overcast, still day, and more small birds —tree sparrows and chickadees — than usual about the house. There have been a very few fine snowflakes falling for many hours, and now, by 2 P. M., a regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. In half an hour the russet earth is painted white even to the horizon. Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? 

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me; that is one peculiarity of winter walking. Anybody may follow my trail. I have walked, perhaps, a particular wild path along some swamp-side all summer, and thought to myself, I am the only villager that ever comes here. But I go out shortly after the first snow has fallen, and lo, here is the track of a sportsman and his dog in my secluded path, and probably he preceded me in the summer as well. Yet my hour is not his, and I may never meet him! 

I asked Coombs the other night if he had been a-hunting lately. He said he had not been out but once this fall. He went out the other day with a companion, and they came near getting a fox. They broke his leg. He has evidently been looking forward to some such success all summer. Having done thus much, he can afford to sit awhile by the stove at the post-office. He is plotting now how to break his head. 

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. 

And all the years that I have known Walden these striped breams have skulked in it without my knowledge! How many new thoughts, then, may I have?

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, November 28, 1858


A regular snow-storm has commenced, fine flakes falling steadily, and rapidly whitening all the landscape. See December 14, 1859 ("Snow-storms might be classified. This is a fine, dry snow"}

Do we know of any other so silent and sudden a change? See January 22, 1854("No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first"); January 26, 1855 ("This morning it snows again,—a fine dry snow with no wind to speak of, giving a wintry aspect to the landscape. . . . What changes in the aspect of the earth! "); November 13, 1858 (“Thus it comes stealthily in the night and changes the whole aspect of the earth.”)

I cannot now walk without leaving a track behind me.  See January 19, 1852 ("It is pleasant to make the first tracks in this road through the woods, . . . the fine, dry snow blowing and drifting still."); November 15, 1858 (" you are now reminded occasionally in your walks that you have contemporaries, and perchance predecessors. I see the track of a fox . . ., and, in the wood-path, of a man and a dog.")

Goodwin cannot be a very bad man, he is so cheery. See November 4, 1858 ("On the 1st, when I stood on Poplar Hill, I saw a man. . .took out my glass, and beheld Goodwin, the one-eyed Ajax, in his short blue frock, short and square-bodied, as broad as for his height he can afford to be.")