Saw, January 20th, some tree sparrows in the yard. Once or twice of late I have seen the mother-o’-pearl tints and rainbow flocks in the western sky. The usual time is when the air is clear and pretty cool, about an hour before sundown. Yesterday I saw a very permanent specimen, like a long knife-handle of mother-of-pearl, very pale with an interior blue and rosaceous tinges. Methinks the summer sky never exhibits this so finely.
When I was at C.’s the other evening, he punched his cat with the poker because she purred too loud for him.
R. Rice says he saw a white owl two or three weeks since. Harris told me on the 19th that he had never found the snow-flea.
No second snow-storm in the winter can be so fair and interesting as the first. Last night was very windy, and to-day I see the dry oak leaves collected in thick beds in the little hollows of the snow-crust. These later falls of the leaf.
A fine freezing rain on the night of the 19th produced a hard crust on the snow, which was but three inches deep and would not bear.
