I measured the thickness of the frozen ground at the deep cut on the new Bedford road, about half-way up the hill. They dig under the frozen surface and then crack it off with iron wedges, with much labor, in pieces from three to six feet square. It was eighteen inches thick and more there thicker higher up, not so thick lower down the hill.
Saw in Sleepy Hollow a small hickory stump, about six inches in diameter and six inches high, so completely, regularly, and beautifully covered by that winkle-like fungus in concentric circles and successive layers that the core was concealed and you would have taken it for some cabbage-like plant. This was the way the wound was healed. The cut surface of the stump was completely and thickly covered.
Our neighbor Wetherbee was J. Moore's companion when he took that great weight of pickerel this winter. He says it was fifty-six pounds in Flint's, in one day, and that four of them weighed eighteen pounds and seven ounces.
My alder catkins in the pitcher have shed their pollen for a day or two, and the willow catkins have pushed out half an inch or more and show red and yellowish.
H. D. Thoreau, Journal, February 22, 1854
The frozen ground at the deep cut on the new Bedford road. See January 9, 1856 ("In passing through the deep cut on the new Bedford road, I saw that a little sand, which was pretty coarse, almost gravel, had fallen from the bank, and was blown over the snow, here and there.")
That winkle-like fungus in concentric circles and successive layers. See October 10, 1858 ("The simplest and most lumpish fungus has a peculiar interest to us, compared with a mere mass of earth, because it is so obviously organic and related to ourselves, however mute. . . .[T]he humblest fungus betrays a life akin to my own. It is a successful poem in its kind.")
Four of them weighed eighteen pounds and seven ounces. See December 29, 1858 ("Heavy Haynes was fishing a quarter of a mile this side of Hubbard’s Bridge. He had caught a pickerel, which the man who weighed it told me (he was apparently a brother of William Wheeler’s, and I saw the fish at the house where it was) weighed four pounds and three ounces. It was twenty-six inches long."); February 29, 1856 ("Minott told me this afternoon of his catching a pickerel in the Mill Brook once, . . . which weighed four pounds. . . . and I willingly listen to the stories he has told me half a dozen times already.”); May 4, 1858 (" A man told him that he saw a trout weighing about a pound and a half darting at a pickerel, and every time he darted he took a bit off a fin, and at last the man walked in and caught the pickerel, and it weighed five pounds"); April 3, 1859 ("I hear that Peter Hutchinson hooked a monstrous pickerel at the Holt last winter. It was so large that he could not get his head through the hole, and so they cut another hole close by, and then a narrow channel from that to the first to pass the line through, but then, when they came to pull on the line, the pickerel gave a violent jerk and escaped. Peter thinks that he must have weighed ten pounds.") See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Pickerel
My alder catkins in the pitcher have shed their pollen for a day or two. See March 6, 1853 ("Last Sunday I plucked some alder twigs, some aspen, and some swamp willow, and put them in water in a warm room, Immediately the alder catkins were relaxed and began to lengthen and open, and by the second day to drop their pollen"); March 10, 1853 ("The alder's catkins — the earliest of them — are very plainly expanding, or, rather, the scales are loose and separated, and the whole catkin relaxed."); March 22, 1853 ("The very earliest alder is in bloom and sheds its pollen. I detect a few catkins at a distance by their distinct yellowish color. This the first native flower")
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