A clear and beautiful day after frost.

  Looking over the meadow westward from Merrick’s Pasture Shore, I see the alders beyond Dodd’s, now quite bare and gray (maple-like) in the morning sun (the frost melted off, though I found a little ice on my boat-seat),—that true November sight,—ready to wear frost leaves and to transmit (so open) the tinkle of tree sparrows. How wild and refreshing to see these old black willows of the river-brink, unchanged from the first, which man has never cut for fuel or for timber! Only the muskrat, tortoises, blackbirds, bitterns, and swallows use them . . .