Wind northwest, growing cooler.

February 7. 

2 p. m. — To Walden and Flint's. 

Thermometer 43°. Fair, with many clouds, mostly obscuring the sun. Wind northwest, growing cooler.

The sand has begun to flow on the west side of the cut, the east being bare. Nature has some bowels at last.

I notice over the ditch near the Turnpike bridge, where water stands an inch or two deep over the ice, that the dust which had blown on to the ice from the road is now very regularly and handsomely distributed over the ice by the water, i. e., is broken into prettily shaped small black figures equally distant from one another, — so that what was a deformity is now a beauty. 

Some kinds of worms or caterpillars have apparently crawled over it and left their trails on it, white or clear trails.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 7, 1860

The sand has begun to flow on the west side of the cut. See Walden ("When the frost comes out in the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the sand begins to flow down the slopes . . . As it flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, making heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated, lobed, and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you are reminded of coral, of leopards' paws or birds' feet, of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. It"); March 30, 1856 ("I come out to see the sand and subsoil in the Deep Cut, as I would to see a spring flower, some redness in the cheek of Earth.")