A fine healthy and handsome scarlet oak.

December 13. 

December 13, 2016

P. M. — To Hill and round by J. Hosmer woodland and Lee house. 

I see some of those great andromeda puffs still hanging on the twigs behind Assabet Spring, black and shrivelled bags. 

The river is generally open again. The snow is mostly gone. In many places it is washed away down to the channels made by the mice, branching galleries. 

I go through the lot where Wheeler's Irishmen cut last winter. Though they changed hands, they did not cut twice in a place, and the stump, instead of having a smooth surface, is roughly hacked. 

There is a fine healthy and handsome scarlet oak between Muhlenbergii Brook and the Assabet River watering-place, in the open land. It is about thirty- five feet high and spreads twenty-five, perfectly regular. It is very full of leaves, excepting a crescent of bare twigs at the summit about three feet wide in the middle. The leaves have a little redness in them.

There is a dense growth of young birches from the seed in the sprout-land lot just beyond on the riverside, now apparently two or three years old,

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 13, 1856

The river is generally open again.   See December 13, 1850 ("The river froze over last night, — skimmed over."); December 13, 1852 ("River and ponds all open."); December 13, 1859 (" Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also.)

Though they changed hands, they did not cut twice in a place. . .  See December 11, 1856 ("[Minott] complains that the choppers make a very long carf nowadays, doing most of the cutting on one side, to avoid changing hands so much.")

A  fine healthy and handsome scarlet oak . . . very full of leaves, . . . a little redness in them. See October 30, 1855 ("I see that the scarlet oak leaves have still some brightness; perhaps the latest of the oaks."); October 21, 1855 ("Up Assabet. . . . [T]he scarlet oak is very bright and conspicuous. How finely its leaves are out against the sky with sharp points, especially near the top of the tree! . . .)

There is a dense growth of young birches from the seed in the sprout-land lot . . . See December 8, 1859 ("The birches, seen half a mile off toward the sun, are the purest dazzling white of any tree.")