the commencement of a glacier, for it is precisely on this principle that glaciers are formed and continue to extend until they stretch at last into the flowery meadows, as in Switzerland, where you find strawberries and ice in the same field. Let a snow-bank harden into ice by successive thaws and frosts, pass through one summer, and the next year it will be more than doubled in bulk, continuing to increase in size, and consequently in strength, until it bids defiance to the greatest heats of summer. It is in this way, that from the higher peaks of the Alps and Andes, covered with these vast ice mantles, five thousand years old, glaciers stretch far down into the region of grass and flowers, increasing rather than diminishing every year, since what is lost in summer seldom equals what is added in winter.
Thursday, 13th—A solitary goldfinch on the lawn. They winter about New York, but seldom return here in large numbers before the 1st of May.
A brown creeper has been running over the locusts on the lawn for several days; it is unusual to see them in the village, but this bird remained so long that his identity was clearly settled. The little fellow continued for an hour or more among the same trees visited previously by the nut-hatch, and during that time he was not still a second. Always alighting on the trunk near the roots, he ascended to the top; then taking flight, alighted at the roots of the next, repeating again and again the same evolutions with untiring rapidity. If he found the insects he was in search of, he must have swallowed them without much ceremony, for he never seemed to pause for the purpose of eating. Probably, like the nut-hatches, these birds neglect the smaller limbs of a tree because their prey is not found there.
