THIS DATE, FROM HENRY DAVID THOREAU'S JOURNAL

March 18, 1861

Tree sparrows have warbled faintly for a week.

When I pass by a twig of willow, though of the slenderest kind, rising above the sedge in some dry hollow early in December, or in midwinter above the snow, my spirits rise as if it were an oasis in the desert. The very name “sallow” (salix, from the Celtic sal-lis, near water) suggests that there is some natural sap or blood flowing there. It is a divining wand that has not failed, but stands with its root in the fountain.

April 7, 1861

Sunday. Round the two-mile square.

I see where the common great tufted sedge (Carex stricta) has started under the water on the meadows, now fast falling. The white maple at the bridge not quite out. See a water-bug and a frog. Hylas are heard to-day.

I see where the meadow flood has gone down in a bay on the southeast side of the meadow, whither the foam had been driven. A delicate scum now left an inch high on the grass. It is a dirty white, yet silvery, and as thin as the thinnest foil, often unbroken and apparently air-tight for two or three inches across and almost as light as gossamer. What is the material? It is a kind of paper, but far more delicate than man makes.

Saw in a roadside gutter at Simon Brown’s barn a bird like the solitary tattler, with a long bill, which at length flew off to the river. But it may have been a small species of snipe.

April 9, 1861

Small reddish butterflies common; also, on snow banks, many of the small fuzzy gnats and cicindelæ and some large black dor-bug-like beetles. The two latter are easily detected from a distance on the snow.

The phoebe note of chickadee.

White frosts these mornings.

worm-piles in grass at Clamshell.

April 6, 1861

Am surprised to find the river fallen some nine inches notwithstanding the melted snow. But I read in Blodget that the quivalent in water is about one tenth. Say one ninth in this case, and you have one and one third inches, and this falling on an unfrozen surface, the river at the same time falling from a height, shows why it was no more retarded (far from being absolutely raised).

There is now scarcely a button-ball to be seen on Moore’s tree, where there were many a month ago or more. The balls have not fallen entire, but been decomposed and the seed dispersed gradually, leaving long, stringy stems and their cores dangling still. It is the storms of February and March that disperse them.

The (are they cinnamon?) sparrows are the finest singers I have heard yet, especially in Monroe’s garden, where I see no tree sparrows. Similar but more prolonged and remarkable and loud.

March 8, 1861

I just heard peculiar faint sounds made by the air escaping from a stick which I had just put into my stove. It sounded to my ear exactly like the peeping of the hylodes in a distant pool, a cool and breezy spring evening, - as if it were designed to remind me of that season.

February 15, 1861

A little thunder and lightning late in the afternoon. I see two flashes and hear two claps.

A kitten is so flexible that she is almost double; the hind parts are equivalent to another kitten with which the fore part plays. She does not discover that her tail belongs to her till you tread upon it.

How eloquent she can be with her tail! Its sudden swellings and vibrations! She jumps into a chair and then stands on her hind legs to look out the window; looks steadily at objects far and near, first turning her gaze to this side then to that, for she loves to look out a window as much as any gossip. Ever and anon she bends back her ears to hear what is going on within the room, and all the while her eloquent tail is reporting the progress and success of her survey by speaking gestures which betray her interest in what she sees.

Then what a delicate hint she can give with her tail! passing perhaps underneath, as you sit at table, and letting the tip of her tail just touch your legs, as much as to say, I am here and ready for that milk or meat, though she may not be so forward as to look round at you when she emerges.

Only skin-deep lies the feral nature of the cat, unchanged still. I just had the misfortune to rock on to our cat’s leg, as she was lying playfully spread out under my chair. Imagine the sound that arose, and which was excusable; but what will you say to the fierce growls and flashing eyes with which she met me for a quarter of an hour thereafter? No tiger in its jungle could have been savager.

February 5, 1861

Horace Mann brings me a screech owl, which was caught in Hastings’s barn on the meeting-house avenue. It had killed a dove there. This is a decidedly gray owl, with none of the reddish or nut brown of the specimen of December 26, though it is about the same size, and answers exactly to Wilson’s mottled owl.

Rice brings me an oak stick with a woodpecker’s hole in it by which it reached a pupa.

The first slight rain and thaw of this winter was February 2d.

January 11, 1861

Horace Mann brings me the contents of a crow’s stomach in alcohol. It was killed in the village within a day or two. It is quite a mass of frozen-thawed apple, - pulp and skin, - with a good many pieces of skunk-cabbage berries one fourth inch or less in diameter, and commonly showing the pale-brown or blackish outside, interspersed, looking like bits of acorns, - never a whole or even half a berry, - and two little bones as of frogs (?) or mice (?) or tadpoles; also a street pebble a quarter of an inch in diameter, hard to be distinguished in appearance from the cabbage seeds.

January 3, 1861

The third considerable snow-storm.

The berries which I celebrate appear to have a range--most of them--very nearly coterminous with what has been called the Algonquin Family of Indians, whose territories are now occupied by the Eastern, Middle, and Northwestern States and the Canadas, and completely surrounded those of the Iroquois, who occupied what is now the State of New York. These were the small fruits of the aAgonquin and Iroquois families. The Algonquins appear to have described this kind of fruits generally by words ending in the syllables meenar.

It is true we have in the Northern States a few wild plums and inedible crab-apples, a few palatable grapes and nuts, but I think that our various species of berries are our wild fruits to be compared with the more celebrated ones of the tropics, and that, taking all things into consideration, New England will bear comparison with the West India Islands. I have not heard of any similar amusement there superior to huckleberrying here, the object not being merely to get a shipload of something which you can eat or sell.