days there now begins to be added to the rustling or washing water-fall like sound of the wind, this faintest imaginable prelude of the toad. I often draw my companion's attention to it, and he fails to hear it at all, it is so slight a departure from the previous monotony of March. This morning you walked in the warm sproutland, the strong but warm southwest wind blowing, and you heard no sound but the dry and mechanical susurrus of the wood; now there is mingled with or added to it, to be detected only by the sharpest ears, this first and faintest imaginable voice. I heard this under Mount Misery. Probably the toads come forth earlier under the warm slopes of that hill. . . . At evening I hear the first real robin's song.
April 5, 1841. This long series of desultory mornings does not tarnish the brightness of the prospective days. Surely faith is not dead. Wood, water, earth, air are essentially what they are. Only society has degenerated. This lament for a golden age is only a lament for golden men.
April 5, 1854. This morning heard a familiar twittering over the house, looked up and saw white-bellied swallows. Another saw them yesterday. Surveying all day. In Carlisle. I have taken off my outside coat, perhaps for the first time, and hung it on a tree. The
