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  Joe Smith says that he saw blackbirds this morning. I hear that robins were seen a week or more ago. So the birds are quite early this year.

  P.M.—Up river on ice . . .

  There are several men of whose comings and goings the town knows little. I mean the trappers. They may be seen coming from the woods and river, perhaps with nothing in their hands, and you do not suspect what they have been about . . . But, few as the trappers are here, it seems by Goodwin’s accounts that they steal one another’s traps . . .

  Colder, and frozen ground; strong wind, northwest.

  I noticed yesterday in the street some dryness of stones at crossings and in the road and sidewalk here and there, and even two or three boys beginning to play at marbles, so ready are they to get at the earth . . .

For ourselves, we were content to receive it for what it was—a most original, quaint, humorous, lifelike and entertaining description of Cape Cod and its inhabitants, and we care not whether it comes under the denomination of lecture, sketch, travels, or fish story! Nor do we think it without instruction. We shall certainly never think of Cape Cod without recalling images of rocky shores, and their ghastly dead, its desert beaches, its masculine women, and its verten wreckers. Cape Cod is no longer blank on our mental map. Its natural features and its inhabitants are pictured there, and we have added so much to our knowledge of “men and things.”

. . .

The merry and well preserved old man they met there, his “good for nothing critter” of a wife, with whom he had lived 64 years, her aged daughter, the boy, and the fool; the old man’s rambling and unceasing talk, the scene at the breakfast table, recalling the laughable one between Johnson and Boswell at the inn; the story of the calm, and the scraps of information thrown scatteringly in,—all these were worth telling could we give them in the tone and manner of the lecturer. But as we cannot, we pause.

  When Sophia told R. Rice that Dr. B. said that Foster was an infidel and was injuring the young men, etc., “Did he?” he observed. “Well, he is a great man. He swims in pretty deep water, but it isn’t very extensive.” When she added, “Mr. Frost says that Garrison had to apologize for printing Foster’s sermon,” he said, “Did he? Well, they may set as many back fires as they please; they won’t be of any use; they’ll soon go out.” She said the selectmen were going to ask seven dollars instead of five for the hall. But he said that he would build them a hall, if they would engage to give him five dollars steadily. To be sure, it would riot be quite so handsome as the present, but it should have the same kind of seats.

  The clay in the Deep Cut is melting and streaming down, glistening in the sun. It is I that melts, while the harp sounds on high, and the snow-drifts on the west side look like clouds.

  We turned down the brook at Heywood’s meadow . . .

  The sun reflected from the sandy, gravelly bottom sometimes a bright sunny streak no bigger than your finger, reflected from a ripple as from a prism, and the sunlight, reflected from a hundred points of the surface of the rippling brook, enabled me to realize summer. But the dog partly spoiled the transparency of the water by running in the brook . . .

  Having gone a quarter of a mile beyond the bridge, where C. calls this his Spanish Brook, I looked back from the top of the hill on the south into this deep dell . . .

  Now we are on Fair Haven, still but a snow plain . . .

  We returned down the brook at Heywood’s meadow.