contrast with the white ground, their verdure becomes what the shopmen call an “invisible green,” darker than their own shadows lying on the snow. They seem at this moment to have put on a sort of half-mourning for their leafless companions. But let the snow melt, let the brown earth reappear, and their beauty returns—they are green again. There are many days in our winter when the woods of pine and hemlock look all but black. The trees taken singly, however, are always beautiful.
Saturday, 20th.—A crust has formed on the snow after the late thaw, so that we were enabled to leave the track this afternoon. It is very seldom that one can do this; there is rarely any crust here strong enough to bear a grown person. We are wholly confined to the highways and village streets for winter walks. One may look up never so longingly to the hills and woods, they are tabooed ground, like those inaccessible mountains of fairyland guarded by genii. Even the gardens and lawns are trackless wastes at such times, crossed only by the path that leads to the doorway.
Occasionally, however, a prolonged thaw carries off the snow, even from the hills, and then one enjoys a long walk with redoubled zest. Within the last few years we have been on Mount —— every month in the winter; one season in December, another in January, and a third in February. But such walks are quite out of the common order of things from the first of December to the fifteenth of March. During all that time, we usually plod humbly along the highways.
Monday, 22d.—The Albany papers give an extract from a paper of St. Lawrence county, which mentions that an animal becoming rare in this State, has recently been killed in that part of
