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  When I think of the Carlisle man whom I saw to-day and the filthiness of his house, I am reminded that there are all degrees of barbarism, even in this so-called civilized community. Carlisle, too, belongs to the Nineteenth Century.

  Saw Perez Blood in his frock,—a stuttering, sure, unpretending man, who does not speak without thinking, does not guess.

  As we walked over the Cedar Hill, Mr. Weston asked me if I had ever noticed how the frost formed around a particular weed in the grass, and no other. It was a clear cold morning. We stooped to examine, and I observed, about the base of the Lechea major (?), or larger pinweed, the frost formed into little flattened trumpets or bells, an inch or more long, with the mouth down about the base of the stem. They were very conspicuous, dotting the grass white. But what was most remarkable was that, though there were plenty of other dead weeds and grasses about, no other species exhibited this phenomenon . . .

  I observed a mouse run down a bush by the pond-side. I approached and found that he had neatly covered over a thrasher or other bird’s nest (it was made partly of sticks like a thrasher’s), about four or five feet from the ground, and lined it warmly with that common kind of green moss (?) which grows about the base of oaks, but chiefly with a kind [of] vegetable wool, perhaps from the wool-grass. He appeared to be a reddish brown above and cream-colored beneath, and ran swiftly down the stems . . .

  I see some of those great andromeda puffs still hanging (in the twigs behind Assabet Spring, black and shrivelled bags. The river is generally open again. The snow is mostly gone. In many places it is washed away down to the channels made by the mice, branching galleries . . .

  This and the like ponds are just covered with virgin ice just thick enough to bear, though it cracks about the edges on the sunny sides. You may call it virgin ice as long as it is transparent . . .

  My first true winter walk is perhaps that which I take on the river, or where I cannot go in the summer. It is the walk peculiar to winter . . .

  There is now, at 2.30 P.M., the melon-rind arrangement of the clouds. Really parallel columns of fine mackerel sky, reaching quite across the heavens from west to east, with clear intervals of blue sky, and a fine-grained vapor like spun glass extending in the same direction beneath the former. In half an hour all this mackerel sky is gone . . .

  Now that the river is frozen we have a sky under our feet also. Going over black ice three or four inches thick, only reassured by seeing the thickness at the cracks, I see it richly marked internally with large whitish figures suggesting rosettes of ostrich-feathers or coral . . .