spring, as I now hear the laborer's sledge on the rails. . . . . As we grow older, is it not ominous that we have more to write about evening, less about morning. We must associate more with the early hours.
February 24, 1854. p. m. To Walden and Fair Haven. Nuthatches are faintly answering each other, tit for tat, on different keys—a faint creak. Now and then one utters a loud, distinct quah. This bird, more than any other I know, loves to stand with its head downward; meanwhile, chickadees, with their silver tinkling are flitting high above through the tops of the pines. . . . . Observed in one of the little pond holes between Walden and Fair Haven, where a partridge had traveled around in the snow, amid the bordering bushes, twenty-five rods; had pecked the green leaves of the lambkill, and left fragments on the snow, and had paused at each high blueberry bush, and shaken down fragments of its bark on the snow. The buds appeared to be its main object. I finally scared the bird.
February 24, 1855. The brightening of the willow or of osiers, that is a season in the spring, showing that the dormant sap is awakened. I now remember a few osiers which I have seen early in past springs, thus brilliantly green or red, and it is as if all the landscape
