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  I see with my glass as I go over the railroad bridge, sweeping the river, a great gull standing far away on the top of a muskrat-cabin which rises just above the water opposite the Hubbard Bath. When I get round within sixty rods of him, ten minutes later, he still stands on the same spot . . .

  It is still quite tight at Hubbard’s Bath Bend and at Clamshell, though I hesitate a little to cross at these places. There are dark spots in the soft, white ice . . .

  A still and warm but overcast morning, threatening rain. I now again hear the song sparrow’s tinkle along the riverside, probably to be heard for a day or two, and a robin, which also has been heard a day or two. The ground is almost completely bare, and but little ice forms at night along the riverside.

  I meet Goodwin paddling up the still, dark river on his first voyage to Fair Haven for the season, looking for muskrats and from time to time picking up driftwood—logs and boards, etc.—out of the water and laying it up to dry on the bank, to eke out his wood-pile with . . .

  Almost every bush has its song sparrow this morning, and their tinkling strains are heard on all sides. You see them just hopping under the bush or into some other covert, as you go by, turning with a jerk this way and that, or they flit away just above the ground, which they resemble. It is the prettiest strain I have heard yet . . .

  P.M.—To Fair Haven Hill via Hubbard’s Bath.

  How much more habitable a few birds make the fields! At the end of winter, when the fields are bare and there is nothing to relieve the monotony of the withered vegetation, our life seems reduced to its lowest terms. But let a bluebird come and warble over them, and what a change! The note of the first bluebird in the air answers to the purling rill of melted snow beneath. It is eminently soft and soothing . . .

  Flood, who is saving rails, etc., at the stone bridge, remarks that old settlers say this stream is highest the third day after a rain . . .

  Rice thinks that he has seen two gulls on the Sudbury meadows,—the white and the gray gulls . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] picks up at Clamshell a very thin piece of pottery about one eighth of an inch thick , which appears to contain much pounded shell . . .

  Pratt says that his bees come out in a pleasant day at any time in the winter; that of late they have come out and cased themselves, the ground being covered around the hives with their yellow droppings . . .