Their yellow pollen is shaken down and colors my coat like sulphur as I pass through them. I go to look for mud-turtles in Heywood's Meadow. The alder catkins just burst open are prettily marked spirally by streaks of yellow, contrasting with alternate rows of rich reddish-brown scales, which make one revolution in the length of the catkin. I hear in Heywood's north meadow the most unmusical low croak from one or two frogs, though it is half ice there yet. A remarkable note with which to greet the new year, as if one's teeth slid off with a grating sound in cracking a nut, but not a frog nor a dimple to be seen.
Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone. I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations. I should be the magnet in the midst of all this dust and filings. I knock the back of my hand against a rock, and as I smooth back the skin I find myself prepared to study lichens there. I look upon man but as a fungus. I have almost a slight, dry headache as the result of all this observation. How to observe is how to behave. Oh, for a little Lethe. To crown all, lichens which are so thin
