Log Search Results

  9 A.M.—Start to get two quarts of white maple sap and home at 11.30 . . .

  You bore a little hole with your knife, and presently the wounded sap-wood begins to glisten with moisture, and anon a clear crystalline tear-like drop flows out and runs down the bark, or drops at once to the snow. This is the sap of which the far-famed maple-sugar is made. That’s the sweet liquor which the Indians boiled a thousand years ago . . .

  The water is fast going down. See a small waterbug. It is pretty still and warm. As I round the Island rock, a striped squirrel that was out [on] the steel) polypody rock scampered up with a chuckle . . .

  Returning about 5 P.M. across the Depot Field, I scare up from the ground a flock of about twenty birds . . . (Journal, 10:319-320).

  Southeast wind. Begins to sprinkle while I am sitting in Laurel Glen, listening to hear the earliest wood frogs croaking . . . . It is a singular sound for awakening Nature to make, associated with the first warmer days, when you sit in some sheltered place in the woods amid the dried leaves. How moderate on her first awakening, how little demonstrative! You may sit half an hour before you will hear another . . .

  Returning, above the railroad causeway, I see a flock of goldfinches, first of spring, flitting along the causeway-bank . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] sees geese go over again this afternoon . . .

  2 P.M.—About 39. To Copan . . .

  I saw two red squirrels in an apple tree, which were rather small, had simply the tops of their backs red and the sides and beneath gray!

  Fox-colored sparrows go flitting past with a faint, sharp chip, amid some oaks . . .

  P. M.—Talked, or tried to talk with R.W.E. Lost my time—nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind—told me what I knew—and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him . . .