half brown and withered, with bright green centres, at least. . . . There is but a narrow strip of bare ground reaching a few rods into the wood along the edge, but the less ground there is bare, the more we make of it. Such a day as this I resort where the partridges, etc., do, to the bare ground and the sheltered sides of woods and hills, and there explore the moist ground for the radical leaves of plants while the storm lowers overhead, and I forget how the time is passing. If the weather is thick and stormy enough, if there is a good chance to be cold and wet and uncomfortable, in other words to feel weather-beaten, you may consume the afternoon to advantage, thus browsing along the edge of some near wood which would scarcely detain you at all in fair weather, and you will get as far away there as at the end of your longest fair-weather walk, and come home as if from an adventure. There is no better fence to put between you and the village than a storm into which the villagers do not venture out. I go looking for green radical leaves. What a dim and shadowy existence have now to our memories the fair flowers whose localities they mark! How hard to find any trace of their stem now, after it has been flattened under the snows of the winter. I go feeling with wet and freezing fingers amid the withered grass and the

snow for their prostrate stems, that I may reconstruct the plant. But greenness so absorbs my attention that sometimes I do not see the former rising from the midst of those radical leaves when it almost puts my eyes out. The radical leaves of the shepherd's purse are particularly bright. Men of science, when they pause to contemplate the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, or as they sometimes call Him "the Almighty Designer," speak of Him as a total stranger whom it is necessary to treat with the highest consideration. They seem suddenly to have lost their wits.

March 8, 1860. To Cliffs and Walden. See a small flock of grackles on the willow row above railroad bridge. How they sit and make a business of chattering, for it cannot be called singing, and there is no improvement from age to age, perhaps. Yet as nature is a becoming, these notes may become melodious at last. At length, on my very near approach, they flit suspiciously away, uttering a few subdued notes as they hurry off. This is the first flock of blackbirds I have chanced to see, though C. saw one the 6th.

To say nothing of fungi, lichens, mosses, and other cryptogamous plants, you cannot say that vegetation absolutely ceases at any season in this latitude. For there is grass in some warm

exposures and in springy places always growing more or less, and willow catkins expanding and peeping out a little farther every warm day from the very beginning of winter, and the skunk-cabbage buds being developed and actually flowering sometimes in the winter, and the sap flowing in the maples on some days in mid-winter, and perhaps some cress growing a little (?), certainly some pads, and various naturalized garden weeds steadily growing, if not blooming, and apple buds sometimes expanding. Thus much of vegetable life, or motion, or growth, is to be detected every winter. There is something of spring in all seasons. There is a large class which is evergreen in its radical leaves, which make such a show as soon as the snow goes off that many take them to be a new growth of the spring. In a pool I notice that the crowfoot (buttercup) leaves which are at the bottom of the water stand up and are much more advanced than those two feet off in the air, for there they receive warmth from the sun, while they are sheltered from cold winds. Nowadays we separate the warmth of the sun from the cold of the wind, and observe that the cold does not pervade all places, but being due to strong northwest winds, if we get into some sunny and sheltered nook where they do not penetrate, we quite forget how cold it is else

where.

I meet some Indians just camped on Brister's Hill. As usual, they are chiefly concerned to find where black ash grows for their baskets. This is what they set about to ascertain as soon as they arrive in any strange neighborhood.

March 9, 1852. A warm spring rain in the night. 3 P. M. Down the railroad. Cloudy, but spring-like. When the frost comes out of the ground there is a corresponding thawing of the man. The earth is now half bare. These March winds, which make the woods roar and fill the world with life and bustle, appear to wake up the trees out of their winter sleep and excite the sap to flow. I have no doubt they serve some such use, as well as to hasten the evaporation of the snow and water. The railroad men have now their hands full. I hear and see bluebirds come with the warm wind. The sand is flowing in the deep cut. I am affected by the sight of the moist red sand or subsoil under the edge of the sandy bank under the pitch pines. The railroad is perhaps our pleasantest and wildest road. It only makes deep cuts into and through the hills. On it are no houses nor foot-travelers. The travel on it does not disturb me. The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges.

Even the laborers on it are not like other laborers. Its houses, if any, are shanties, and its ruins the ruins of shanties, shells where the race that built the railroad dwelt; and the bones they gnawed lie about. I am cheered by the sound of running water now down the wooden troughs each side the cut. This road breaks the surface of the earth. Here is the dryest walking in wet weather, and the easiest in snowy. Even the sight of smoke from the shanty excites me to-day. Already these puddles on the railroad, reflecting the pine woods, remind me of summer lakes.

When I hear the telegraph harp I think I must read the Greek poets. This sound is like a brighter color, red, or blue, or green, where all was dull white or black. It prophesies finer senses, a finer life, a golden age. It is the poetry of the railroad. The heroic and poetic thoughts which the Irish laborers had at their toil have now got expression, that which has made the world mad so long. Or is it the gods expressing their delight at this invention? The flowing sand bursts out through the snow and overflows it where no sand was to be seen.

Again it rains, and I turn about. The sounds of water falling on rocks and of air falling on trees are very much alike. Though cloudy, the air excites me. Yesterday all was tight as a