The most wintry day of the winter.

February 20.

Snows all day. The most wintry day of the winter; yet not more than three inches on a level is fallen. 

We hear the names of the worthies of Concord, — Squire Cuming and the rest,—but the poor slave Casey seems to have lived a more adventurous life than any of them. Squire Cuming probably never had to run for his life on the plains of Concord.

H.. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 20, 1858

The most wintry day of the winter. See February 19, 1858 ("Coldest morning this winter by our thermometer, -3° at 7.30.")

Walden ice.

February 18. 

I find Walden ice to be nine and a half plus inches thick, having gained three and a half inches since the 8th. 

The Rubus hispidus (sempervirens of Bigelow) is truly evergreen. 

There has been so little snow this winter that I have noticed it the more, — red, glossy, and, as it were, plaited. 

I see the ice, three inches thick, heaved up tentwise eighteen inches or more in height, near the shore, yet where the water is too deep for the bottom to have been heaved, as if some steam had heaved it. 

At Brister's further spring, the water which trickles off in various directions between and around little mounds of green grass half frozen, when it reaches the more mossy ground runs often between two perpendicular walls of ice, as at the bottom of a cañon, the top of these perfectly square-edged banks being covered with the moss that originally covered the ground (otherwise undisturbed) and extending several feet on each side at the same level. These icy cliffs are of a loose crystalline composition, with many parallel horizontal seams, as if built up. I suppose that the water flows just under the moss, and, freezing, heaves it one stage; then the next night, perchance, new water, flowing underneath, heaves the whole another stage; and so on, steadily lifting it up. 

Far from here, I see the surface of weeds and mud lifted up in like manner where there is no cañon or rill, but a puddle. 

George Minott tells me that he, when young, used often to go to a store by the side of where Bigelow's tavern was and kept by Ephraim Jones, – the Goodnow store. That was probably the one kept by my old trader. 

Told me how Casey, who was a slave to a man — Whitney — who lived where Hawthorne owns, —the same house, — before the Revolution, ran off one Sunday, was pursued by the neighbors, and hid him self in the river up to his neck till nightfall, just across the Great Meadows. He ran through Gowing's Swamp and came back that night to a Mrs. Cogswell, who lived where Charles Davis does, and got something to eat; then cleared far away, enlisted, and was freed as a soldier after the war. 

Whitney's boy threw snow balls at him the day before, and finally C., who was chopping in the yard, threw his axe at him, and W. said he was an ugly nigger and he must put him in jail. 

He may have been twenty years old when stolen from Africa; left a wife and one child there. Used to say that he went home to Africa in the night and came back again in the morning; i. e., he dreamed of home. Lived to be old. Called Thanksgiving “Tom Kiver.”

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 18, 1858