We have had no thaw yet

January 15 .

More snow last night, and still the first that fell remains on the ground.

Rice thinks that it is two feet deep on a level now.

We have had no thaw yet.

Rice tells me that he baits the "seedees" and the jays and crows to his door nowadays with corn.

He thinks he has seen one of these jays stow away some where, without swallowing, as many as a dozen grains of corn, for, after picking it up, it will fly up into a tree near by and deposit so many successively in different crevices before it descends.

Speaking of Roman wormwood springing up abundantly when a field which has been in grass for twenty years or more is plowed, Rice says that, if you carefully examine such a field before it is plowed, you will find very short and stinted specimens of wormwood and pigweed there, and remarkably full of seed too!

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 15, 1861