Measuring Little Goose Pond

December 2. 

December 2, 2017

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. When I broke it with my fist over each in succession, it was stunned by the blow. I put them back through the hole; else they might have frozen outside. There was a brown leech spread broad and flat and roundish on the sternum of one, nearly an inch and a half across, apparently going to winter with it. 

Where are the respectabilities of sixty years ago, the village aristocracy, the Duncan Ingrahams who lived in the high house? An Englishman lived in the Vose house. How poor and short-lived a distinction to strive after! 

I find that, according to the deed of Duncan Ingraham to John Richardson in 1797, my old bean-field on Walden Pond then belonged to George Minott. (Minott thinks he bought it of an Allen.) This was Deacon George Minott, who lived in the house next below the East Quarter schoolhouse, and was a brother of my grandfather-in-law. He was directly descended from Thomas Minott, who, according to Shattuck, was secretary of the Abbot of Walden (!) in Essex, and whose son George was born at Saffron Walden (!) and afterwards was one of the early settlers of Dorchester. 

Roads were once described as leading to a meeting house, but not so often nowadays.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, December 2, 1857

Measuring Little Goose Pond, I observed two painted tortoises moving about under the thin transparent ice. See December 13, 1857 ("This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear,. . . I see those same two tortoises (of Dec. 2d), moving about in the same place under the ice, which I can not crack with my feet.”); December 4, 1853 ("Goose Pond apparently froze over last night, all but a few rods, but not thick enough to bear. I see a lizard on the bottom under the ice.“) See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, the Painted Turtle (Emys picta)