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  One discovery in meteorology, one significant observation, is a good deal. I am grateful to the man who introduces order among the clouds. Yet I look up into the heavens so fancy free, I am almost glad not to know any law for the winds.

  I find the partridges among the fallen pine-tops on Fair Haven these afternoons, an hour before sundown, ready to commence budding in the neighboring orchard. The mosses on the rocks look green where the snow has melted. This must be one of the spring signs, when spring comes.

  A man came to our house at noon and got something to eat, who set out this morning to go from Waltham to Noah Wheeler’s in Nine Acre Corner. He got as far as Lee’s Bridge on the side of Lincoln, or within three quarters of a mile of Wheeler’s, and could not get over the river on account of the freshet; so he came round through Concord village,—he might have come over the railroad a little nearer,—and I directed him over the railroad bridge, the first by which he could cross dry-shod down the stream, and up-stream he would have been obliged to go to Saxonville.

  When I step out into the, yard I hear that earliest spring note from some bird, perhaps a pigeon woodpecker (or can it be a nuthatch, whose ordinary note I hear?), the rapid whar whar, whar whar, whar whar, which I have so often heard before any other note.

  I thought at one time that I heard a bluebird. Hear a fly buzz amid some willows.

  Thermometer at 1 P.M., 65.

  Sophia says that Mrs. Brooks’s spireas have started considerably! . . .

  At Brister’s further spring, the water which trickles off in various directions between and around little mounds of green grass half frozen . . .

  George Minott tells me that he, when young, used often to go to a store by the side of where Bigelow’s tavern was and kept by Ephraim Jones,—the Goodnow store . . .

The snow is fine: and drives low; is composed of granulated masses one sixteenth to one twentieth of an inch in diameter. Not in flakes at all. I think it is not those large-flaked snow-storms that are the worst for the traveller, or the deepest.

  It would seem as if the more odd and whimsical the conceit, the more credible to the mass. They require a surprising truth, though they may well be surprised at any truth . . .

  Sometimes, when I go forth at 2 P.M., there is scarcely a cloud in the sky, but soon one will appear in the west and steadily advance and expand itself, and so change the whole character of the afternoon and of my thoughts. The history of the sky for that afternoon will be but the development of that cloud . . .

  I will accept the offer contained in your last, & will forward to you a paper called “Autumnal Tints” in a day or two.

  I must ask two favors. First, that I may see the proofs, chiefly that I may look after my peculiarities, for I may not be well enough thoroughly to revise them, and therefore trust that you have a sharp-eyed reader, who will save me that labor.

  Secondly, I wish to have the MSS, of this article preserved, since I have no duplicate, & what I send will be culled out of a very large imperfect essay, whose integrity I wish to restore.

Respectfully,
Henry D. Thoreau