Though the sun is now an hour high, there is a peculiar bright light on the pines and on their stems. The lichens on their bark reflect it. In the horizon I see a succession of the brows of hills, bare or covered with wood,—look over the eyebrows of the recumbent earth. These are separated by long valleys filled with vapory haze.
If there is a little more warmth than usual at this season, then the beautiful air which belongs to winter is perceived and appreciated.
Dec. 6. Being at Newburyport this evening, Dr. (H. C.?) Perkins showed me the circulations in the nitella, which is slightly different from the chara, under a microscope. I saw plainly the circulation, looking like bubbles going round in each joint, up one side and down the other of a sort of white line, and sometimes a dark-colored mote appeared to be carried along with them. He said that the circulation could be well seen in the common celandine, and moreover that when a shade was cast on it by a knife-blade the circulation was reversed. Ether would stop it, or the death of the plant.
He showed me a green clamshell,—Anodon fluviatilis,—which he said was a female with young, found in a pond near by.
Also the head of a Chinook or Flathead.
Also the humerus of a mylodon (of Owen) from Oregon. Some more remains have been found in Missouri, and a whole skeleton in Buenos Ayres. A digging animal.
He could not catch his frogs asleep.
Dec. 8. It snowed in the night of the 6th, and the ground is now covered,—our first snow, two inches deep. A week ago I saw cows being driven home from pasture. Now they are kept at home. Here’s an end to their grazing. The farmer improves this first slight snow to accomplish some pressing jobs,—to move some particular rocks on a drag, or the like. I perceive how quickly he has seized the opportunity. I see no tracks now of cows or men or boys beyond the edge of the wood. Suddenly they are shut up. The remote pastures and hills beyond the woods are now closed to cows and cowherds, aye, and to cowards. I am struck by this sudden solitude and remoteness which these places have acquired. The dear privacy and retirement and solitude which winter makes possible! carpeting the earth with snow, furnishing more than woolen feet to all walkers, cronching the snow only. From Fair Haven I see the hills and fields, aye, and the icy woods in the corner shine, gleam with the dear old wintry sheen. Those are not surely the cottages I have seen all summer. They are some cottages which I have in my mind.
