Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/89

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EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.
75

with a still finer grass. The hole was on one side, and the bottom was near two inches thick. There were many small paths or galleries in the meadow leading to this from the brook some rod or more distant.

The small gyrinus is circling in the brook. I see where much fur of a rabbit, which probably a fox was carrying, has caught on a moss-rose twig as he leaped a ditch. . . . . There is a peculiar redness in the western sky just after sunset. There are many great dark slate-colored clouds floating there, seen against more distant and thin wispy, bright, vermillion, (?) almost blood-red, ones, which in many places appear as the lining of the former. . . . . I see in many places where, after the late freshet, the musquash made their paths under the ice, leading from the water a rod or two to a bed of grass above the water level.

March 6, 1858. p. m. Up river on ice to Fair Haven Pond. The river is frozen more solidly than during the past winter, and for the first time for a year I could cross it in most places. I did not once cross it the past winter, though by choosing a safe place I might have done so without doubt once or twice. But I have had no river walks before. I see the first hen-hawk or hawk of any kind, methinks, since the beginning of winter. Its scream, even, is