Thoreau writes in his journal:
Saw three ducks sailing in the river behind [Moses?] Prichard’s this afternoon, black with white on wings, though these two or three have been the coldest days of the winter, and the river is generally closed. Observed a new wall, of stones recently dug out of the earth, all yellow and easily detected at a distance, not yet gray with lichens . . . As I approached Bateman’s Pond, the ice looked blue . . . I saw an improvement, I suppose by William Brown, on the shore of the pond this afternoon, which really is something to tell of. The exploits of the farmer are not often reported even in the agricultural paper, nor are they handed down by tradition from father to son, praiseworthy and memorable as so many of them are… Here was an extensive swamp, level of course as a floor, which first had been cut, then ditched broadly, then burnt over; then the surface paved off, stumps and all, in great slices; then these piled up every six feet, three or four feet high, like countless larger muskrat-cabins, to dry; then fire put to them; and so the soil was tamed. We witnessed the different stages in different parts of the swamp . . . I tasted some black shrivelled pyrus berries in a spruce swamp; rather sweet.
Concord, Mass. William Ellery Channing writes in his journal:
Saw 3 ducks in river, which is open below my house. Spruce in swamps. Remarkable rocks; singular splits in them. The world was not made in a day, & singular clearing behind Brown’s, stump ready to run. Ice sky-blue. Batemans pond, next went across beyond A Melvin’s to the Cliff of Spring. But I was hurried along & could not see things well. It is bad to be hurried & against your will specially. I begin to wonder whether I shall ever write any more verse. Went over the fields of B the milkman. a large, energetic farmer. 2 fishers on Bateman’s.
(William Ellery Channing notebooks and journals. Houghton Library, Harvard University)
Channing also writes in his journal on 29 January:
Walked yest with H D T; not very pleasing (William Ellery Channing notebooks and journals. Houghton Library, Harvard University).
