Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/112

98 as if dried (for it is nearly cold enough to freeze), like the first crystals that shoot and set on water when freezing C. says he saw yesterday the slate-colored hawk, with a white bar across tail, meadow hawk, i. e., frog hawk. Probably it finds moles and mice.

March 9, 1859 At Corner Spring Brook the water reaches up to the crossing, and stands over the ice there, the brook being open and some space each side of it. When I look from forty to fifty rods off at the yellowish water covering the ice about a foot here, it is decidedly purple (though, when I am close by and looking down on it, it is yellowish merely), while the water of the brook and channel, and a rod on each side of it, where there is no ice beneath, is a beautiful very dark blue. These colors are very distinct, the line of separation being the edge of the ice on the bottom; and this apparent juxtaposition of different kinds of water is a very singular and pleasing sight. You see a light purple flood about the color of a red grape, and a broad channel of dark purple water, as dark as a common blue-purple grape, sharply distinct across its middle.

March 10, 1852. I was reminded this morning before I rose, of those undescribed ambrosial mornings of summer which I can remember, when a thousand birds were heard gently