Pretty good sleighing.

March 9.

About three inches more of snow fell last night, which, added to about five of the old, makes eight, or more than before since last spring. Pretty good sleighing. 

The State commonly grants a tract of forest to make an academy out of, for such is the material of which our institutions are made, though only the crudest part of it is used, but the groves of the academy are straight way cut down, and that institution is built of its lumber, its coarsest and least valuable part. Down go the groves of the academy and up goes its frame, — on some bare common far away. And as for the public domains, if anybody neglected his civil duties during the last war, he is privileged to cut and slash there, — he is let loose against one hundred and sixty acres of well-behaved trees, as if the liberty he had defended was derived from liber, bark, and meant the liberty to bark the trees.

H.  D. Thoreau, Journal, March 9, 1858

About three inches more of snow fell last night, which, added to about five of the old, makes eight, or more than before since last spring. See March 2, 1858 ("Snowed last night and this morning, about seven inches deep, much more than during the winter, the first truly wintry-looking day so far as snow is concerned,"); March 1, 1858 ("We have just had a winter with absolutely no sleighing, which I do not find that any one distinctly remembers the like of.") Compare March 9, 1856 ("[S]ixteen inches of snow on a level in open fields, hard and dry, ice in Flint’s Pond two feet thick, and the aspect of the earth is that of the middle of January in a severe winter.")