Passed a very little boy in the street to-day, who had on a home-made cap of a woodchuck-skin, which his father or elder brother had killed and cured, and his mother or elder sister had fashioned into a nice warm cap. I was interested by the sight of it, it suggested so much of family history, adventure with the chuck, story told about [it], not without exaggeration, the human parents’ care of their young these hard times . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] saw a dozen robins to-day on the ground on Ebby Hubbard’s hill by the Yellow Birch Swamp. One tells me that George Hubbard told him he saw blackbirds go over this afternoon . . .

  As I go down the Boston road, I see an Irishman wheeling home from far a large damp and rotten pine log for fuel. He evidently sweats at it, and pauses to rest many times. He found, perhaps, that his wood-pile was gone before the winter was, and he trusts thus to contend with the remaining cold. I see him unload it in his yard before me and then rest himself. The piles of solid oak wood which I see in other yards do not interest me at all, but this looked like fuel. It warmed me to think of it . . .