Counting rings of the stumps of a primitive wood cut in the last century

October 29.

P. M. – To Eb. Hubbard’s old black birch bill.

Henry Shattuck’s is a new pitch pine wood, say thirty years old.

The western, or greater, part contains not a single seed-bearing white pine.

It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines but scarcely one little pitch pine. It is also well stocked with minute oak seedlings.

It is a dense wood, say a dozen rods wide by three or four times as long, running east and west, with an oak wood on the north, from which the squirrels brought the acorns.

A strip of nearly the same width of the pitch pine was cut apparently within a year on the south (a part of the above), and has just been harrowed and sown with rye, and still it is all dotted over with the little oak seedlings between the stumps, which are perhaps unnoticed by Shattuck, but if he would keep his plow and fire out he would still have a pretty green patch there by next fall.

A thousand little red flags (changed oak leaves) already wave over the green rye amid the stumps.

The farmer stumbles over these in his walk, and sweats while he endeavors to clear the land of them, and yet wonders how oaks ever succeed to pines, as if he did not consider what these are.

Where these pines are dense they are slender and tall.

On the edge or in open land they are more stout and spreading.

Again, as day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak, with an awkward and rapid seesaw or teetering motion, it has to lift its head so high to acquire the requisite momentum. The jays scold about almost every white oak tree, since we hinder their coming to it.

At some of the white oaks visited on the 11th, where the acorns were so thick on the ground and trees, I now find them perhaps nearly half picked up, yet perhaps little more than two thirds spoiled.

The good appear to be all sprouted now.

There are certainly many more sound ones here than at Beck Stow’s and Hubbard’s Grove, and it looks as if the injury had been done by frost, but perhaps some of it was done by the very heavy rains of September alone.

Yesterday and to-day I have walked rapidly through extensive chestnut woods without seeing what I thought was a seedling chestnut, yet I can soon find them in our Concord pines a quarter or half a mile from the chestnut woods.

Several have expressed their surprise to me that they cannot find a seedling chestnut to transplant.  I think that it is with them precisely as with the oaks; not only a seedling is more difficult to distinguish in a chestnut wood, but it is really far more rare there than in the adjacent pine, mixed, and oak woods.

After considerable experience in searching for these and seedling oaks, I have learned to neglect the chestnut and oak woods and go only to the neighboring woods of a different species for them. Only that course will pay.

On the side of E. Hubbard’s hill I see an old chestnut stump some two feet in diameter and nearly two feet high, and its outside and form well kept, yet all the inside gone; and from this shot up four sprouts in a square around it, which were cut down seven or eight years ago.

Their rings number forty-six, and they are quite sound, so that the old stump was cut some fifty-three years ago. This is the oldest stump of whose age I am certain.

Hence I have no doubt that there are many stumps left in this town which were cut in the last century.

I am surprised to find on this hill (cut some seven or eight years ago) many remarkably old stumps wonderfully preserved, especially on the north side the hill, — walnuts, white oak and other oaks, and black birch.

One white oak is eighteen and a half inches in diameter and has one hundred and forty-three rings. This is very one-sided in its growth, the centre being just four inches from the north side, or thirty - six rings to an inch. Of course I counted the other side.

Another, close by, gave one hundred and forty-one rings, another white oak fifteen and a half inches in diameter had one hundred and fifty-five rings. It has so smooth (sawed off) and solid, almost a polished or marble- ike, surface that I could not at first tell what kind of wood it was.

Another white oak the same as last in rings, i. e. one hundred and fifty-five, twenty-four inches in  diameter. All these were sound to the very core, so that I could see the first circles, and I suspect that they were seedlings.

The smaller, but oldest ones had grown very slowly at first, and yet more slowly at last, but after some sixty five years they had then grown much faster for about fifteen years, and then grew slower and slower to the last. The rings were exceedingly close together near the outside, yet not proportionably difficult to count.

For aught that appeared, they might have continued to grow a century longer.

The stumps are far apart, so that this formed an open grove, and that probably made the wood sounder and more durable.

On the south slope many white pines had been cut about forty-six years ago, or when the chestnut was, amid the oaks. I suppose that these were seedlings, and perhaps the hill was cleared soon after the settlement of the town, and after a while pines sprang up in the open land, and seedling oaks under the pines, and, the latter being cut near the end of the seventeenth century, those oaks sprang up, with or without pines, but all but these were cut down when they were about sixty years old.

If these are seedlings, then seedlings make much the best timber.

I should say that the pasture oaks generally must be seedlings on account of their age, being part of the primitive wood.

I suspect that sprouts, like the chestnut, for example, may grow very rapidly, and make large trees in comparatively few years, but they will be decaying [?] as fast at the core as they are growing at the circumference.  The stumps of chestnuts, especially sprouts are very shaky. 

It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long.


The oldest of these oaks began their existence about 1697.  I doubt if there were any as old trees in our primitive wood as stood in this town fifty years ago.

The healthiest of the primitive wood, having at length more room, light, and air, probably grew larger than its ancestors.

Some of the black birch stumps gave about one hundred rings.

The pasture oak which Sted Buttrick cut some seven or eight years ago, northeast of this, was, as near as I could tell, — one third was calculation, — some one hundred years old only, though larger than any of these.

The fine chips which are left on the centre of a large stump preserve it moist there, and rapidly hasten its decay.

The site of the last - named pasture oak was easily discovered, by a very large open grass - sward where no sweet - fern, lambkill, huckleberry, and brakes grew, as they did almost everywhere else.

This may be because of the cattle assembling under the oak, and so killing the bushes and at the same time manuring the ground for grass.

There is more chestnut in the northern part of the town than I was aware of.

The first large wood north of Ponkawtasset is oak and chestnut. East of my house.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 29, 1860

It is a remarkable proof of my theory, for it contains thousands of little white pines . stocked with minute oak seedlings. See May 13, 1856 ("I suspect that I can throw a little light on the fact that when a dense pine wood is cut down oaks, etc., may take its place. "); September 24, 1857("You would have said that there was not a hardwood tree in it, young or old, though I afterward found . . . on looking closely over its floor, that, . . .there was, as often as every five feet, a little oak, three to twelve inches high, and in one place I found a green acorn dropped by the base of a tree. I was surprised, I confess, to find my own theory so perfectly proved."); June 3, 1856 (“As I have said before, it seems to me that the squirrels, etc., disperse the acorns, etc., amid the pines, . . . If the pine wood had been surrounded by white oak, probably that would have come up after the pine.”) and The Succession of Forest Trees (“If a pine wood is surrounded by a white-oak one chiefly, white-oaks may be expected to succeed when the pines are cut.”)

It is with men as with trees; you must grow slowly to last long. See November 5, 1860 ("Such trees continue to expand with nearly equal rapidity to an extreme old age.  This wood is a hundred to a hundred and sixty years old.”);   July 19, 1851 (“Methinks my seasons revolve more slowly than those of nature; I am differently timed. . . . If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?”)

As day before yesterday, sitting on the edge of a pine wood, I see a jay fly to a white oak half a dozen rods off in the pasture, and, gathering an acorn from the ground, hammer away at it under its foot on a limb of the oak See October 27, 1860 (“I see a jay, which was screaming at me, fly to a white oak eight or ten rods from the wood in the pasture and directly alight on the ground, pick up an acorn, and fly back into the woods with it. This was one, perhaps the most effectual, way in which this wood was stocked with the numerous little oaks which I saw under that dense white pine grove.”) ;  The Succession of Forest Trees (“I can confirm what William Bart ram wrote to Wilson, the ornithologist, that " The jay is one of the most useful agents in the economy of nature, for disseminating forest trees"”) 

To Baker’s old chestnut lot near Flint’s Pond

October 26. 

P. M. – To Baker’s old chestnut lot near Flint’s Pond.

As I go through what was formerly the dense pitch pine lot on Thrush Alley (G. Hubbard’s), I observe that the present growth is scrub oak, birch, oaks of various kinds, white pines, pitch pines, willows, and poplars. Apparently, the birch, oaks, and pitch pines are the oldest of the trees.

From the number of small white pines in the neighboring pitch pine wood, I should have expected to find larger and also more white pines here. It will finally become a mixed wood of oak and white and pitch pine.

There is much cladonia in the lot. 

Observed yesterday that the row of white pines set along the fence on the west side of Sleepy Hollow had grown very fast, apparently from about the time they were set out, or the last three years. Several had made grow the fastest at just this age, or after they get to be about five feet high? 

I see to-day sprouts from chestnut stumps which are two and a half feet in diameter (i. e. the stumps). One of these large stumps is cut quite low and hollowing, so as to hold water as well as leaves, and the leaves prevent the water from drying up. It is evident that in such a case the stump rots sooner than if high and roof like. 

I remember that there were a great many hickories with R. W. E.’s pitch pines when I lived there, but now there are but few comparatively, and they appear to have died down several times and come up again from the root. I suppose it is mainly on account of frosts, though perhaps the fires have done part of it.

Are not hickories most commonly found on hills? There are a few hickories in the open land which I once cultivated there, and these may have been planted there by birds or squirrels. It must be more than thirty-five years since there was wood there. 

I find little white pines under the pitch pines (of E.), near the pond end, and few or no little pitch pines, but between here and the road about as many of one as of the other, but the old pines are much less dense that way, or not dense at all. 

This is the season of the fall when the leaves are whirled through the air like flocks of birds, the season of birch spangles, when you see afar a few clear-yellow leaves left on the tops of the birches. 

It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. I remember a large old pine and chestnut wood there some twenty years ago . He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. I mean that acre at the bottom of the hollow.

It is now one of those frosty hollows so common in Walden Woods, where little grows, sheep’s fescue grass, sweet-fern, hazelnut bushes, and oak scrubs whose dead tops are two or three feet high, while the still living shoots are not more than half as high at their base. They have lingered so long and died down annually.

At length I see a few birches and pines creeping into it, which at this rate in the course of a dozen years more will suggest a forest there.

Was this wise? 

Examined the stumps in the Baker chestnut lot which was cut when I surveyed it in the spring of’52.  They were when cut commonly from fifty to sixty years old (some older, some younger).

The sprouts from them are from three to six inches thick, and may average-the largest — four inches, and eighteen feet high. The wood is perhaps near half oak sprouts, and these are one and a half to four inches thick, or average two and a half, and not so high as the chestnut.

Some of the largest chestnut stumps have sent up no sprout, yet others equally large and very much more decayed have sent up sprouts. Can this be owing to the different time when they were cut? The cutting was after April.

The largest sprouts I chanced to notice were from a small stump in low ground. Some hemlock stumps there had a hundred rings.

Was overtaken by a sudden thunder-shower.

Cut a chestnut sprout two years old. It grew about five and a half feet the first year and three and a half the next, and was an inch in diameter. The tops of these sprouts, the last few inches, had died in the winter, so that a side bud continued them, and this made a slight curve in the sprout, thus: There was on a cross-section, of course, but one ring of pores within the wood, just outside the large pith, the diameter of the first year’s growth being just half an inch, radius a fourth of an inch.

The thickness of the second year’s growth was the same, or one fourth, but it was distinctly marked to the naked eye with about seven concentric lighter lines, which, I suppose, marked so many successive growths or waves of growth, or seasons in its year.

These were not visible through a microscope of considerable power, but best to the naked eye.

Probably you could tell a seedling chestnut from a vigorous sprout, however old or large, provided the heart were perfectly sound to the pith, by the much more rapid growth of the last the first half-dozen years of its existence. 

There are scarcely any chestnuts this year near Britton’s, but I find as many as usual east of Flint’s Pond. 

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, October 26, 1860

It was a mistake for Britton to treat that Fox Hollow lot as he did. He came and cut it off and burned it over, and ever since it has been good for nothing. See  October 16, 1860 (" I have come up here this afternoon to see the dense white pine lot beyond the pond, . . .To my surprise and chagrin, I find that the fellow who calls himself its owner has burned it all over and sowed winter-rye here.. . .He needs to have a guardian placed over him. A forest-warden should be appointed by the town. Overseers of poor husbandmen.")

Probably you could tell a seedling chestnut from a vigorous sprout, however old or large, by the much more rapid growth of the last the first half-dozen years of its existence. See November 6, 1857 ("seventy years ago . . .there was a large old chestnut by the roadside there, which being cut, two sprouts came up which have become the largest chestnut trees by the wall now.")

There are scarcely any chestnuts this year near Britton’s, but I find as many as usual east of Flint’s Pond. See August 14, 1856 ("All the Flint's Pond wood-paths are strewn with these gay-spotted chestnut leaves") October 18, 1856 ("A-chestnutting down Turnpike and across to Britton's, thinking that the rain now added to the frosts would relax the burs which were open and let the nuts drop . . ."); October 22, 1857("Chestnut trees are almost bare. Now is just the time for chestnuts."); October 23, 1855 ("Now is the time for chestnuts. A stone cast against the trees shakes them down in showers upon one’s head and shoulders."); December 22, 1859 ("I see in the chestnut woods near Flint's Pond where squirrels have collected the small chestnut burs left         the trunks on the snow.")

October 26. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, October 26 and A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The seasons and all their changes are in me.

We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

April 9.

P. M. — To Goose Pond. 

The wind is as strong, and yet colder, being more from the north, than before. Through, I think, all this windy weather, or at least for about three weeks, the wind has regularly gone down with the sun, strong as it has been each day. 

As we go up the hill in the woods east of Hubbard's Close, I hear a singular sound through the roaring of the wind amid the trees, which I think at first some creature forty rods off, but it proves to be the creaking of one bough on another. When I knew what it was I was surprised to find it so near, even within a rod. 

It was occasioned by two little dead limbs, an inch or less in diameter, on two different white pines which stood four or five feet apart, — such limbs as are seen on every white pine below the living ones, some twelve feet from the ground. These with every motion of the trees in the wind were grating back and forth on each other, and had worn into one another, and this produced, not a mere coarse, grating sound, but a perfect viol sound, such as I never heard from trees before, — a jarring or vibratory creak, as if the bow leaped on the strings, for one limb was bow and the other string. 

It was on one key or note when the trees approached, and quite another and very fine and sharp when they receded. I raised one limb with a pole, and the music ceased. This was as musical as a viol, a forest viol, which might have suggested that instrument to some Orpheus wandering in the wood. He would only have to place a box of resonant wood beneath to complete a simple viol. 

We heard several others afterward which made a coarse, squeaking noise like a bird, but this would have suggested music to any one. It was mythologic, and an Indian might have referred it to a departed spirit. The fiddles made by the trees whose limbs cross one another, — played on by the wind! 

When we listened, in the wood, we heard all kinds of creaking and groaning sounds from the laboring trees. 

We go seeking the south sides of hills and woods, or deep hollows, to walk in this cold and blustering day. We sit by the side of Little Goose Pond, which C. calls Ripple Lake or Pool, to watch the ripples on it. Now it is nearly smooth, and then there drops down on to it, deep as it lies amid the hills, a sharp and narrow blast of the icy north wind careering above, striking it, perhaps, by a point or an edge, and swiftly spreading along it, making a dark-blue ripple. Now four or five windy bolts, sharp or blunt, strike it at once and spread different ways. The boisterous but playful north wind evidently stoops from a considerable height to dally with this fair pool which it discerns beneath. 

You could sit there and watch these blue shadows playing over the surface like the light and shade on changeable silk, for hours. 

It reminds me, too, of the swift Camilla on a field [of] grain. The wind often touches the water only by the finest points or edges. 

It is thus when you look in some measure from the sun, but if you move round so as to come more opposite to him, then all these dark-blue ripples are all sparkles too bright to look at, for you now see the sides of the wavelets which reflect the sun to you. 

A large fox-hole in Britton's hollow, lately dug; an ox-cartload of sand, or more, thrown up on the hill side. 

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. 

It is only on small lakes deep sunk in hollows in the woods that you can see or study them these days, for the winds sweep over the whole breadth of larger lakes incessantly, but they only touch these sheltered lake lets by fine points and edges from time to time. 

And then there is such a fiddling in the woods, such a viol-creaking of bough on bough, that you would think music was being born again, as in the days of Orpheus. Orpheus and Apollo are certainly there taking lessons; aye, and the jay and the blackbird, too, learn now where they stole their "thunder." They are perforce silent, meditating new strains. 

When the playful breeze drops on the pool, it springs to right and left, quick as a kitten playing with dead leaves, clapping her paw on them. Sometimes it merely raises a single wave at one point, as if a fish darted near the surface. 

While to you looking down from a hillside partly from the sun, these points and dashes look thus dark-blue, almost black, they are seen by another, standing low and more opposite to the sun, as the most brilliant sheeny and sparkling surface, too bright to look at. 

Thus water agitated by the wind is both far brighter and far darker than smooth water, seen from this side or that, — that is, as you look at the inclined surface of the wave which reflects the sun, or at the shaded side. 

For three weeks past, when I have looked northward toward the flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the north west, making high waves and much shadow. 

We can sit in the deep hollows in the woods, like Frosty Hollow near Ripple Lake, for example, and find it quite still and warm in the sun, as if a different atmosphere lurked there; but from time to time a cold puff from the rude Boreas careering overhead drops on us, and reminds us of the general character of the day. 

While we lie at length on the dry sedge, nourishing spring thoughts, looking for insects, and counting the rings on old stumps. 

These old gray or whitish stumps, with their porous structure where the ducts are seen, are very much like bones, — the bones of trees. I break a little cube out of this old oak stump, which was sawed off some thirty years ago, and which has about one hundred rings, — a piece sharply square-cornered and exactly the form of a square bunch of matches; and, the sawed end being regularly channelled by time in the direction of the ducts and of the silver grain, it looks precisely like the loose ends, or dipped end of the bunch, and would be mistaken for such on any shelf. 

Those ripple lakes lie now in the midst of mostly bare brown or tawny dry woodlands, themselves the most living objects. 

They may say to the first woodland flowers, We played with the north winds here before ye were born.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 9, 1859

Watching the ripples fall and dash across the surface of low-lying and small woodland lakes is one of the amusements of these windy March and April days. See March 2, 1860 ("The great phenomenon these days is the sparkling blue water, — a richer blue than the sky ever is. The flooded meadows are ripple lakes on a large scale. . . . These are ripple days begun, — not yet in woodland pools, where is ice yet. "); March 9, 1860 (“March began warm, and I admired the ripples made by the gusts on the dark-blue meadow flood, and the light-tawny color of the earth, and was on the alert to hear the first birds.”); March 14, 1860 ("I see some dark ripples already drop and sweep over the surface of [Walden], as they will ere long over Ripple Lake and other pools in the wood."); April 15, 1860 ("Ripples spread fan-like over Fair Haven Pond, from Lee's Cliff, as over Ripple Lake."); April 21, 1859 ("This Ripple Lake with the wind playing over it,. . . this play of ripples which reflect the sky,-- a darker blue than the real"); April 29, 1859 ("There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake.")

The flooded meadows they have looked dark-blue or blackish, in proportion as the day was clear and the wind high from the northwest. See April 9, 1856 ("The water on the meadows now, looking with the sun, is a far deeper and more exciting blue than the heavens."); see also March 29, 1852 ("The water on the meadows looks very dark from the street. Their color depends on the position of the beholder in relation to the direction of the wind.") Also seeA Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Blue waters in Spring

No one dreamed of snipe an hour ago.

April 2. 

P. M. — To Lee's Cliff (walking). 

April 2, 2019

Alders [Incana on causeways, i. e. the earliest ones] generally appear to be past prime. 

I see a little snow ice in one place to-day. It is still windy and cool, but not so much so as yesterday. 

I can always sail either up or down the river with the rudest craft, for the wind always blows more or less with the river valley. But where a blunt wooded cape or hill projects nearly in the direction to which the wind is blowing, I find that it blows in opposite directions off that shore, while there may be quite a lull off the centre. This makes a baffling reach. Generally a high wood close upon the west side of our river, the prevailing winds being northwest, makes such a reach. 

There are many fuzzy gnats now in the air, windy as it is. Especially I see them under the lee of the middle Conantum cliff, in dense swarms, all headed one way, but rising and falling suddenly all together as if tossed by the wind. They appear to love best a position just below the edge of the cliff, and to rise constantly high enough to feel the wind from over the edge, and then sink suddenly down again. They are not, perhaps, so thick as they will be, but they are suddenly much thicker than they were, and perhaps their presence affects the arrival of the phoebe, which, I suspect, feeds on them. 

From near this cliff, I watch a male sheldrake in the river with my glass. It is very busily pluming it self while it sails about, and from time to time it raises itself upright almost entirely out of water, showing its rosaceous breast. It is some sixty rods off, yet I can see the red bill distinctly when it is turned against its white body. Soon after I see two more, and one, which I think is not a female, is more gray and far less distinctly black and white than the other. I think it is a young male and that it might be called by some a gray duck. However, if you show yourself within sixty rods, they will fly or swim off, so shy are they. Yet in the fall I sometimes get close upon a young bird, which dashes swiftly across or along the river and dives. 

In the wood on top of Lee's Cliff, where the other day I noticed that the chimaphila leaves had been extensively eaten and nibbled off and left on the ground, I find under one small pitch pine tree a heap of the cones which have been stripped of their scales, evidently by the red squirrels, the last winter and fall, they having sat upon some dead limbs above. They were all stripped regularly from the base upward, excepting the five to seven uppermost and barren scales, making a pretty figure like this: —   


I counted two hundred and thirty-nine cones under this tree alone, and most of them lay within two feet square upon a mass of the scales one to two inches deep and three or four feet in diameter. There were also many cones under the surrounding pines. Those I counted would have made some three quarts or more. These had all been cut off by the squirrels and conveyed to this tree and there stripped and eaten. They appeared to have devoured all the fruit of that pitch pine grove, and probably it was they that nibbled the wintergreen. 

No fruit grows in vain. 

The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch pine. His body is about the color of the cone. I should like to get his recipe for taking out pitch, for he must often get his chaps defiled, methinks. These were all fresh cones, the fruit of last year, perhaps. There was a hole in the ground where they lodged by that tree.

I see fly across the pond a rather large hawk, and when at length it turns up am surprised to see a large blackish spot on the under side of each wing, reminding me of the nighthawk. Its wings appeared long and narrow, but it did not show the upper or under side till far off, — sailing [?] so level. What was it? 

The bass recently cut down at Miles Swamp, which averages nearly two and a half feet in diameter at the ground, has forty-seven rings, and has therefore grown fast. 

The black ash is about eighteen inches in diameter and has forty-eight rings. 

The white ash is about fifteen inches in diameter and has seventy-eight rings. 

I see the small botrychium still quite fresh in the open pasture, only a reddish or leathery brown, — some, too, yellow. It is therefore quite evergreen and more than the spleenworts. 

As I go down the street just after sunset, I hear many snipe to-night. This sound is annually heard by the villagers, but always at this hour, i. e. in the twilight, — a hovering sound high in the air, — and they do not know what to refer it to. It is very easily imitated by the breath. A sort of shuddering with the breath. It reminds me of calmer nights. Hardly one in a hundred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. Perhaps no one dreamed of snipe an hour ago, but the air seemed empty of such as they; but as soon as the dusk begins, so that a bird's flight is concealed, you hear this peculiar spirit-suggesting sound, now far, now near, heard through and above the evening din of the village. I did not hear one when I returned up the street half an hour later.

H. D.Thoreau, Journal, April 2, 1859

The red squirrel harvests the fruit of the pitch pine. See January 22, 1856 ("At Walden, near my old residence, I find that . . ., some gray or red squirrel or squirrels have been feeding on the pitch pine cones extensively. "); March 8, 1859 ("Have I ever seen a squirrel eat the pine buds?") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Red Squirrel.

Alders [Incana on causeways, i. e. the earliest ones] generally appear to be past prime.. Compare  April 2, 1856 ("The alder scales do not even appear relaxed yet.");See April 8, 1855 ("I find also at length a single catkin of the Alnus incana, with a few stamens near the peduncle discolored and shedding a little dust when shaken; so this must have begun yesterday . ..  Though I have looked widely, I have not found the alder out before. "); April 8, 1859 ("The Alnus serrulata is evidently in its prime considerably later than the incana, for those of the former which I notice to-day have scarcely begun, while the latter chance to be done. The fertile flowers are an interesting bright crimson in the sun. “); April 9, 1852 ("Observe the Alnus incana, which is distinguished from the common by the whole branchlet hanging down, so that the sterile aments not only are but appear terminal, and by the brilliant polished reddish green of the bark, and by the leaves."); April 9, 1856 ("The Alnus incana, especially by the railroad opposite the oaks, sheds pollen.”). See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Alders


The bass recently cut down at Miles Swamp, which averages nearly two and a half feet in diameter at the ground, has forty-seven rings, and has therefore grown fast. See A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Basswood

Hardly one in a hundred hears it, and perhaps not nearly so many know what creature makes it. See April 9, 1858 ("Persons walking up or down our village street in still evenings at this season hear this singular winnowing sound in the sky over the meadows and know not what it is. This “booming” of the snipe is our regular village serenade. I heard it this evening for the first time, as I sat in the house, through the window. Yet common and annual and remarkable as it is, not one in a hundred of the villagers hears it, and hardly so many know what it is."); April 1, 1853 ("Now, at early starlight, I hear the Snipe’s hovering note as he circles over Nawshawtuct Meadow. "). April 7, 1859 ("I hear there the hovering note of a snipe at 4.30 p.m., — unusually early in the day."); April 25, 1859 ("The snipe have hovered commonly this spring an hour or two before sunset and also in the morning. I can see them flying very high over the Mill-Dam, and they appear to make that sound when descending, — one quite by himself.")  See also A Book of Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Snipe

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides, express more life than most trees

March 6. 

Sunday. P. M. — To Yellow Birch Swamp. 

We go through the swamp near Bee-Tree, or Oak, Ridge, listening for blackbirds or robins and, in the old orchards, for bluebirds. 

Found between two of the little birches in the path (where they grow densely), in Indigo-bird Sprout-land, a small nest suspended between one and two feet above the ground, between two of the little birches. This is where I have seen the indigo-bird in summer, and the nest apparently answers to Wilson's account of that bird's, being fastened with saliva to the birch on each side. 

Wilson says it is "built in a low bush . . . suspended between two twigs, one passing up each side." This is about the diameter of a hair-bird's nest within, composed chiefly of fine bark-shreds looking like grass and one or two strips of grape-vine bark, and very securely fastened to the birch on each side by a whitish silk or cobweb and saliva. It is thin, the lining being prob ably gone. 

There is a very picturesque large black oak on the  the Bee-Tree Ridge, of this form: 

The genista is not evergreen, having turned brown, though it is still quite leafy. I could not find a single green shoot. It is correctly represented in Loudon's "Arboretum," in '44, as "a deciduous under-shrub." Yet in his "Encyclopaedia," in '55, it is represented as "an evergreen shrub." 

Measured a thorn which, at six inches from the ground, or the smallest place below the branches, — for it branches soon, — was two feet three inches in circumference.

Cut off a barberry on which I counted some twenty-six rings, the broadest diameter being about three and a half inches. Both these were on the west side the Yellow Birch Swamp. 

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides, are very pretty. Like the alders, with their reddish catkins, they express more life than most trees. Most trees look completely at rest, if not dead, now, but these look as if the sap must be already flowing in them, — and in winter as well. 

In woodland roads you see where the trees which were bent down by ice, and obstructed the way, were cut off the past winter; their tops lie on one side.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, March 6, 1859

Yellow Birch Swamp.  This is also known as Fever-bush Swamp, Rattlesnake Fern Swamp and Botrychium Swamp,   See note to July 13, 1857 ("Rattlesnake Fern Swamp'); February 18, 1854 ("Yellow Birch Swamp"); July 10, 1857 ("He found, about a week ago, the Botrychium Virginianum in bloom, about the bass in Fever-bush Swamp.”); September 2, 1857 ("In the botrychium swamp, where the fever-bush is the prevailing underwood "); September 16, 1857 ("Botrychium Swamp"); .May 4, 1859 ("Am struck by the beauty of the yellow birches, now fairly begun to be in bloom, at Yellow Birch, or Botrychium, Swamp.");.

Measured a thorn which, at six inches from the groundwas two feet three inches in circumference. See September 2, 1857 ("Measured the thorn at Yellow Birch Swamp. At one foot from ground it is a foot and ten inches in circumference.")

The slender black birches, with their catkined twigs gracefully drooping on all sides. See May 8, 1853 ("The catkins of the black birch gracefully drooping at the ends of the twigs bent down by their weight, conspicuous at a distance.") 

The alders, with their reddish catkins. See March 6, 1853 ("the alder catkins were relaxed and began to lengthen and open, and by the second day to drop their pollen;")

See also: A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, I Have Seen Signs of the Spring:

• Listening for the bluebird
• Catkins expanding

I saw, about west-northwest, a large Green Mountain, perhaps Mansfield Mountain.

July 15. 

Thursday. Continued the ascent of Lafayette, also called the Great Haystack. 

It is perhaps three and a half miles from the road to the top by path along winding ridge. At about a mile and a half up by path, the spruce began to be small. 

Saw there a silent bird, dark slate and blackish above, especially head, with a white line over the brows, then dark slate next beneath, white throat and reddish belly, black bill. A little like a nut hatch. Also saw an F. hyemalis on top of a dead tree. 

The wood was about all spruce here, twenty feet high, together with Vaccinium Canadense, lambkill in bloom, mountain-ash, Viburnum nudum, rhodora, Amelanchier oligocarpa, nemopanthes. 

As I looked down into some very broad and deep ravines from this point, their sides appeared to be covered chiefly with spruce, with a few bodkin points of fir here and there (had seen two days before some very handsome firs on low ground which were actually concave on sides  of cone), while the narrow bottom or middle of the ravine, as far up and down as trees reached, where, of course, there was most water, was almost exclusively hardwood, apparently birch chiefly. 

As we proceeded, the number of firs began to increase, and the spruce to diminish, till, at about two miles perhaps, the wood was almost pure fir about fourteen feet high; but this suddenly ceased at about half a mile further and gave place to a very dwarfish fir, and to spruce again, the latter of a very dwarfish, procumbent form, dense and flat, one to two feet high, which crept yet higher up the mountain than the fir, —over the rocks beyond the edge of the fir, -- and with this spruce was mixed Empetrum nigrum, dense and matted on the rocks, partly dead, with berries already blackening, also Vaccinium uliginosum. 

Though the edges all around and the greater part of such a thicket high up the otherwise bare rocks might be spruce, yet the deeper hollows between the rocks, in the midst, would invariably be filled with fir, rising only to the same level, but much larger round. These firs especially made the stag-horns when dead. 

The spruce was mostly procumbent at that height, but the fir upright, though flat-topped. In short, spruce gave place to fir from a mile and a half to a mile below the top, — so you may say firs were the highest trees, — and then succeeded to it in a very dwarfish and procum bent form yet higher up. 

At about one mile or three quarters below the summit, just above the limit of trees, we came to a little pond, maybe of a quarter of an acre (with a yet smaller one near by), the source of one head of the Pemigewasset, in which grew a great many yellow lilies (Nuphar advena) and I think a potamogeton. 

In the flat, dryish bog by its shore, I noticed the Empetrum nigrum (1), ledum (2), Vaccinium Oxycoccus, Smilacina trifolia, Kalmia glauca (3) (in bloom still), Andromeda calyculata (4) (and I think Polifolia), Eriophorum vaginatum, Vaccinium uliginosum (5), Juncus filiformis, four kinds of sedge (e. g. Carex pauciflora .9), C. irrigua with dangling spikes, and a C. lupulzna-like, and the Scirpus caespitosus (?) of Mt. Washington, brown lichens (q. v.), and cladonias, all low and in a moss-like bed in the moss of the bog; also rhodora of good size. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 were quite dwarfish. 

The outlet of the pond was considerable, but soon lost beneath the rocks. A willow, rostrata-like but not downy, grew there. 

In the dwarf fir thickets above and below this pond, I saw the most beautiful linnaeas that I ever saw. They grew quite densely, full of rose-purple flowers, — deeper reddish purple than ours, which are pale, — perhaps nodding over the brink of a spring, altogether the fairest mountain flowers I saw, lining the side of the narrow horse track through the fir scrub. As you walk, you overlook the top of this thicket on each side. 

There also grew near that pond red cherry, Aster prenanthes (?) and common rue. 

We saw a line of fog over the Connecticut Valley. Found near summit apparently the Vaccinium angustifolium of Aitman (variety of Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum, Gray), bluets, and a broad-leaved vaccinium lower down (q. ‘12.). 

Just below top, reclined on a dense bed of Salix Uva-ursi, five feet in diameter by four or five inches deep, a good spot to sit on, mixed with a rush, amid rocks. This willow was generally showing its down.

We had fine weather on this mountain, and from the summit a good view of Mt. Washington and the rest, though it was a little hazy in the horizon. It was a wild mountain and forest scene from south-southeast round easterwardly to north-northeast. 

On the northwest the country was half cleared, as from Monadnock, -— the leopard-spotted land. I saw, about west-northwest, a large Green Mountain, perhaps Mansfield Mountain, though the compass was affected here. 

The Carex scirpoidea (?) grew at top, and it was surprising how many large bees, wasps, butterflies, and other insects were hovering and fluttering about the very apex, though not particularly below. What attracts them to such a locality.

Heard one white-throated sparrow above the trees, and also saw a little bird by the pond. Think I heard a song sparrow about latter place. Saw a toad near limit of trees, and many pollywogs in the pond above trees. 

Boiled tea for our dinner by the little pond, the head of the Pemigewasset. Saw tracks in the muddy bog by the pond-side, shaped somewhat like a small human foot sometimes, perhaps made by a bear. We made our fire on the moss and lichens, by a rock, amid the shallow fir and spruce, burning the dead fir twigs, or “deer’s-horns.” 

I cut off a flourishing fir three feet high and not flattened at top yet. This was one and a quarter inches in diameter and had thirty four rings. One, also flourishing, fifteen inches high, had twelve rings at ground. One, a dead one, was twenty nine inches in circumference, and at four feet from ground branched horizontally as much as five feet each way, making a flat top, curving upward again into stag horns, with branches very large and stout at base. 

Another fir, close by and dead, was thirty  inches in circumference at ground and only half an inch in diameter at four and a half feet. 

Another fir, three feet high, fresh and vigorous, without a flat top as yet, had its woody part an inch and an eighth thick (or diameter) at base (the bark being one eighth inch thick) and sixty-one rings. There was no sign of decay, though it was, as usual, mossy, or covered with lichens. 

I cut off at ground one of the little procumbent spruce trees, which spread much like a juniper, but not curving upward. This rose about nine inches above the ground, but I could not count the rings, they were so fine. (Vide piece.) 

The smallest diameter of the wood is forty-one eightieths of an inch. The number of rings, as near as I can count with a microscope, taking much pains, is about seventy, and on one side these are included within a radius of nine fortieths of an inch, of which a little more than half is heart-wood, or each layer on this side is less than one three-hundredth of an inch thick. The bark was three fortieths of an inch thick. It was quite round and easy to cut, it was so fresh. 

If the fir thirty inches in circumference grew no faster than that an inch and an eighth in diameter, then it was about five hundred and forty-nine years old. If as fast as the little spruce, it would be nearly fourteen hundred years old. 

When half-way down the mountain, amid the spruce, we saw two pine grosbeaks, male and female, close by the path, and looked for a nest, but in vain. They were remarkably tame, and the male a brilliant red orange, —neck, head, breast beneath, and rump,—blackish wings and tail, with two white bars on wings. (Female, yellowish.) 

The male flew nearer inquisitively, uttering a low twitter, and perched fearlessly within four feet of us, eying us and pluming himself and plucking and eating the leaves of the Amelanchier oligocarpa on which he sat, for several minutes. The female, meanwhile, was a rod off. 

They were evidently breeding there. Yet neither Wilson nor Nuttall speak of their breeding in the United States. 

At the base of the mountain, over the road, heard (and saw), at the same place where I heard him the evening before, a splendid rose-breasted grosbeak singing. I had before mistaken him at first for a tanager, then for a red-eye, but was not satisfied; but now, with my glass, I distinguished him sitting quite still, high above the road at the entrance of the mountain-path in the deep woods, and singing steadily for twenty minutes. 

It was remarkable for sitting so still and where yesterday. It was much richer and sweeter and, I think, more powerful than the note of the tanager or red-eye. It had not the hoarseness of the tanager, and more sweetness and fullness than the red-eye. Wilson does not give their breeding-place. Nuttall quotes Pennant as saying that some breed in New York but most further north. They, too, appear to breed about the White Mountains. 

Heard the evergreen-forest note on the sides of the mountains often. 

Heard no robins in the White Mountains. 

Rode on and stopped at Morrison’s (once Tilton’s) Inn in West Thornton. 

Heracleum lanatum in Notch and near, very large, some seven feet high. 

Observed, as we rode south through Lincoln, that the face of cliffs on the hills and mountains east of the river, and even the stems of the spruce, reflected a pink light at sunset.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 15, 1858

Two pine grosbeaks, male and female, . . .the male a brilliant red orange, —neck, head, breast beneath, and rump,—blackish wings and tail, with two white bars on wings. See December 24, 1851 (“Saw also some pine grosbeaks, magnificent winter birds . . .with red or crimson reflections, more beautiful than a steady bright red would be. The note I heard, a rather faint and innocent whistle of two bars.”)

A splendid rose-breasted grosbeak singing. See May 25, 1854 ("Hear and see . . . the rose-breasted grosbeak, a handsome bird with a loud and very rich song, in character between that of a robin and a red-eye. . . . Rose breast, white beneath, black head and above, white on shoulder and wings.”); May 24, 1855 (“Hear a rose-breasted grosbeak. At first think it a tanager, but soon I perceive its more clear and instrumental — should say whistle, if one could whistle like a flute; a noble singer, reminding me also of a robin; clear, loud and flute-like; . . . Song not so sweet as clear and strong.”); May 21, 1856 (“What strong colored fellows, black, white, and fiery rose-red breasts! Strong-natured, too, with their stout bills. A clear, sweet singer, like a tanager but hoarse somewhat, and not shy.”) See also A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, the Rose-breasted Grosbeak

July 15. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau July 15

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021

The lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir.

July 11. 

Sunday. Mizzling weather. 

Were visited by three men from Glen House, who thought it was well named “ Tucker’s Ravine,” because it tuckered a man out to get to it! 

It rained hard all Sunday night, wetting us but little, however. One of the slender spruce trees by our camp, which we cut down, though it looked young and thrifty, being twenty-eight feet high and only six and a half inches in diameter, had about eighty rings, and the firs were at least as old. 

Wentworth said that he had five hundred acres, and would sell the whole with buildings for $2000. 

He knew a dead log on the fire to be spruce, and not fir, because the stubs of the lower part slanted downward, and also by its “straight rift.” He called a rotten cane “dozy.” After some observation I concluded that it was true that the base of the lower limbs of the spruce slanted downward more generally than those of the fir.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, July 11, 1858

July 11. See A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, July 11

A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau

"A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality.”

~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx © 2009-2021

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen.

February 11. 

At 8 P. M. it is 11° and windy. 

I think it is the coldest day of this winter. The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time. 

P. M. — To Hill. 

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen, but I see none burst. They are very tightly filled and smooth, apparently stretched. 

The leaves of the round-leaved pyrola, so exposed this winter, look not only dark but as if frozen. I am not sure that they are stiffened however. 

I see that the hemlock leaves also have this frozen or frozen thawed, cadaverous look, dark and slightly imbrowned, especially the most exposed twigs, while some sheltered ones are still a bright green. The same is the case even with the white pines and, as far as I observe, other evergreens. 

There is a change in their leaves with cold weather, corresponding to the reddening and darkening of checkerberry and pyrola leaves. They change, though they do not fall, and are to some extent affected, even as those trees which, like the oaks, retain a part of their leaves during the winter in a withered state; i. e., they have begun to wither or be killed. 

I have often before noticed that the pines, when cold weather came, were of a darker and duller green, somewhat like a frozen apple. In the hemlock, at least, there is a positive tendency to redness. The evergreens, then, though they do not fall the first year, lose their original summer greenness; they are changed and partially killed by the cold, like pyrola and checkerberry and lambkill, and even, in a degree, like oak leaves. Perhaps the pitch pine is the least affected. 

Cut a club of celtis wood. It is hard but, I think, brittle. The celastrus (waxwork) is a soft, spongy, and flexible wood, though of very slow growth. You can easily sink your knife into it. I count twenty-five rings in the heart-wood of one which is not quite an inch in diameter. In the sap there is no evidence of rings at all.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 11, 1858

11° and windy. I think it is the coldest day of this winter. Compare January 23, 1857 ("I may safely say that -5° has been the highest temperature to-day.”) January 9, 1856 ("Probably it has been below zero for the greater part of the day."); February 6, 1855 ("They say it did not rise above -6° to-day.”); February 11, 1855 (“Smith’s thermometer early this morning at -22°; ours at 8 A. M. -10°.”)

The water in the pitcher-plant leaves is frozen.  See November 16, 1852 ("At Holden's Spruce Swamp. The water is frozen in the pitcher-plant leaf.")

The river channel is now suddenly and generally frozen over for the first time. Compare January 20, 1857 ("The river has been frozen everywhere except at the very few swiftest places since about December 18th, and everywhere since about January 1st.”)

Little mounds or tufts of yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground.

February 7

Aunt Louisa has talked with Mrs. Monroe, and I can correct or add to my account of January 23d. She says that she was only three or four years old, and that she went to school, with Aunt Elizabeth and one other child, to a woman named Turner, somewhere in Boston, who kept a spinning-wheel a-going while she taught these three little children.

She remembers that one sat on a lignum-vitae mortar turned bottom up, another on a box, and the third on a stool; and then repeated the account of Jennie Burns bringing her little daughter to the school, as before.

I observed yesterday in that oak stump on the ditch bank by Trillium Wood (which I counted the rings of once) that between the twentieth and twenty-seventh ' rings there was only about three sevenths of an inch, though before and after this it grew very fast and seven spaces would make nearly two inches. The tree was growing lustily till twenty years old, and then for seven years it grew only one fourth or one fifth part as fast as before and after. I am curious to know what happened to it.

P. M. —To Cliffs through Wheeler’s pasture on the hill.

This new pasture, with gray stumps standing thickly in the now sere sward, reminds me of a graveyard. And on these monuments you can read each tree’s name, when it was born (if you know when it died), how it throve, and how long it lived, whether it was cut down in full vigor or after the infirrnities of age had attacked it.

I am surprised to find the epigaea on this hill, at the northwest corner of C. Hubbard’s (?) lot, i. e. the large wood. It extends a rod or so and is probably earlier there than where I have found it before. Some of the buds show a very little color. The leaves have lately been much eaten, I suspect by partridges.

Little mounds or tufts of yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground.

If possible, come upon the top of a hill unexpectedly, perhaps through woods, and then see off from it to the distant earth which lies behind a bluer veil, before you can see directly down it, i. e. bringing its own near top against the distant landscape.

In the Fair Haven orchard I see the small botrychium still fresh, but quite dark reddish. 

The bark of the Populus grandidentata there is a green clay-color.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 7, 1858

Aunt Louisa has talked with Mrs. Monroe.  See January 23, 1858 ("Mrs. William Monroe told Sophia last evening that she remembered her (Sophia’s) grandfather very well,")

Epigaea repens: trailing arbutus. See A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, The Epigaea

Populus grandidentata: big-tooth aspen. A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau,the Big-toothed Aspen (Populus grandidentata)

In the Fair Haven orchard I see the small botrychium still fresh, but quite dark reddish. See April 2, 1859 ("I see the small botrychium still quite fresh in the open pasture, only a reddish or leathery brown, — some, too, yellow. It is therefore quite evergreen and more than the spleenworts.")

Yellowish or golden moss in the young woods look like sunlight on the ground. Compare October 25, 1853 ("The ground is strewn with pine-needles as sunlight.")

Little mounds of truth,

yellowish or golden moss:

sunlight on the ground.

zphx

Do not despair of life.

December 27. 

Sunday. A clear, pleasant day. 

P. M. — To Goose Pond. 

Tree sparrows about the weeds in the yard. 

A snowball on every pine plume, for there has been no wind to shake it down. The pitch pines look like trees heavily laden with snow oranges. The snowballs on their plumes are like a white fruit. When I thoughtlessly strike at a limb with my hatchet, in my surveying, down comes a sudden shower of snow, whitening my coat and getting into my neck. You must be careful how you approach and jar the trees thus supporting a light snow. 

Partridges dash away through the pines, jarring down the snow.

Mice have been abroad in the night. We are almost ready to believe that they have been shut up in the earth all the rest of the year because we have not seen their tracks. I see where, by the shore of Goose Pond, one has pushed up just far enough to open a window through the snow three quarters of an inch across, but has not been forth. Elsewhere, when on the pond, I see in several places where one has made a circuit out on to the pond a rod or more, returning to the shore again. Such a track may, by what we call accident, be preserved for a geological period, or be obliterated by the melting of the snow. 

Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet. Near the north shore it cracks under the snow as I walk, and in many places water has oozed out and spread over the ice, mixing with the snow and making dark places. 

Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night. [Yes.] 

I frequently hear a dog bark at some distance in the night, which, strange as it may seem, reminds me of the cooing or crowing of a ring dove which I heard every night a year ago at Perth Amboy. It was sure to coo on the slightest noise in the house; as good as a watch-dog. The crowing of cocks, too, reminds me of it, and, now I think of it, it was precisely the intonation and accent of the cat owl's hoo' hoo-hoo-oo, dwelling in each case sonorously on the last syllable. They get the pitch and break ground with the first note, and then prolong and swell it in the last. 

The commonest and cheapest sounds, as the barking of a dog, produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. It depends on your appetite for sound. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite than confectionery to a pampered or diseased one. 

It is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music in any other sense. I have lain awake at night many a time to think of the barking of a dog which I had heard long before, bathing my being again in those waves of sound, as a frequenter of the opera might lie awake remembering the music he had heard. 

As my mother made my pockets once of Father's old fire-bags, with the date of the formation of the Fire Society on them, – 1794, – though they made but rotten pockets, – so we put our meaning into those old mythologies. I am sure that the Greeks were commonly innocent of any such double-entendre as we attribute to them. 

One while we do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless; we only live on by an effort of the will. Suddenly our condition is ameliorated, and even the barking of a dog is a pleasure to us. 

So closely is our happiness bound up with our physical condition, and one reacts on the other. Do not despair of life. You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. 

Think of the fox prowling through wood and field in a winter night for something to satisfy his hunger. Notwithstanding cold and the hounds and traps, his race survives. I do not believe any of them ever committed suicide. I saw this afternoon where probably a fox had rolled some small carcass in the snow. 

I cut a blueberry bush this afternoon, a venerable looking one bending over Goose Pond, with a gray, flat, scaly bark, the bark split into long, narrow, closely adhering scales, the inner bark dull-reddish. At several feet from the ground it was one and five sixteenths inches in diameter, and I counted about twenty-nine indistinct rings. It seems a very close-grained wood. It appears, then, that some of those old gray blueberry bushes which overhang the pond-holes have attained half the age of man. 

I am disappointed by most essays and lectures. I find that I had expected the authors would have some life, some very private experience, to report, which would make it comparatively unimportant in what style they expressed themselves, but commonly they have only a talent to exhibit. The new magazine which all have been expecting may contain only another love story as naturally told as the last, perchance, but with out the slightest novelty in it. It may be a mere vehicle for Yankee phrases. 

What interesting contrasts our climate affords! In July you rush panting into a pond, to cool yourself in the tepid water, when the stones on the bank are so heated that you cannot hold one tightly in your hand, and horses are melting on the road. Now you walk on the same pond frozen, amid the snow, with numbed fingers and feet, and see the water-target bleached and stiff in the ice.

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

Mice have been abroad in the night. See December 27, 1853 (“ I had not seen a meadow mouse all summer, but no sooner does the snow come and spread its mantle over the earth than it is printed with the tracks of countless mice and larger animals. I see where the mouse has dived into a little hole in the snow, not larger than my thumb, by the side of a weed, and a yard further reappeared again, and so on alternately above and beneath. A snug life it lives.”); January 31, 1856 (“The tracks of the mice suggest extensive hopping in the night and going a-gadding."); February 9, 1856 (“I see a few squirrel-tracks, but no mice-tracks, for no night has intervened since the snow.”); January 15, 1857 (“Such is the delicacy of the impression on the surface of the lightest snow, where other creatures sink, and night, too, being the season when these tracks are made, they remind me of a fairy revel.”)

Goose Pond is not thickly frozen yet. See December 13, 1857 (“This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear, though it cracks about the edges”)

Walden is almost entirely skimmed over. It will probably be completely frozen over to-night. See December 27, 1852 ("Not a particle of ice in Walden to-day. Paddled across it.”); December 27, 1856 ("Walden is still open in one place of considerable extent.. .”); see also December 21, 1854 (“Walden is frozen over, apparently about two inches thick.”); December 24, 1859 (“There is, in all, an acre or two in Walden not yet frozen, though half of it has been frozen more than a week. ”); December 24, 1858 ("Those two places in middle of Walden not frozen over yet, ..."); December 26, 1850 ("Walden not yet more than half frozen over"); December 26, 1853 (“Walden still open.”); December 29, 1855 ("Am surprised to find eight or ten acres of Walden still open . . ."); December 30, 1853 ("The pond not yet frozen entirely over; about six acres open . . .”).

The commonest and cheapest sounds,produce the same effect on fresh and healthy ears that the rarest music does. Just as a crust is sweeter to a healthy appetite. See December 31, 1853 (“Sugar is not so sweet to the palate, as sound to the healthy ear. The contact of sound with a human ear whose hearing is pure and unimpaired is coincident with an ecstasy.”); March 11, 1856; ("I wish so to live ever as to derive my satisfactions and inspirations from the commonest events, every-day phenomena, so that what my senses hourly perceive, my daily walk, the conversation of my neighbors, may inspire me”).

It is better that these cheap sounds be music to us than that we have the rarest ears for music. See August 30, 1856 ("I get my new experiences still, not at the opera listening to the Swedish Nightingale, but at Beck Stow's Swamp listening to the native wood thrush.”); September 7, 1851 ("My profession is. . .to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature.”)

So closely is our happiness bound up with our physical condition. See July 14, 1854 ("Health is a sound relation to nature.”); August 23, 1853 ("Nature" is but another name for health, and the seasons are but different states of health.")

You have no doubt force enough to overcome your obstacles. See December 13, 1857 (“In sickness and barrenness it is encouraging to believe that our life is dammed and is coming to a head, so that there seems to be no loss, for what is lost in time is gained in power. All at once, unaccountably, as we are walking in the woods or sitting in our chamber, after a worthless fortnight, we cease to feel mean and barren.”)

We do not wonder that so many commit suicide, life is so barren and worthless; we only live on by an effort of the will. See January 15, 1857 ("We are all ordinarily in a state of desperation; such is our life; ofttimes it drives us to suicide. To how many, perhaps to most, life is barely tolerable, and if it were not for the fear of death or of dying, what a multitude would immediately commit suicide!”)

I cut a blueberry bush this afternoon, a venerable looking one bending over Goose Pond. . . . half the age of man .See February 8, 1858 ("I cut one, which measured eight and a half inches in circumference at the butt, and I counted pretty accurately forty-two rings. . . . It is a heavy and close-grained wood.")

Now you walk on the same pond frozen, amid the snow, with numbed fingers and feet, and see the water-target bleached and stiff in the ice. See December 13, 1857 (“I see the water-target leaves frozen in under the ice in Little Goose Pond.”)