Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/127

Rh gradual, but sure, like the expanding of a flower. This is the first song I have heard.

To Cliffs. River higher than at any time in the winter, I think Musk-rats are driven out of their holes. Heard one's loud plash, behind Hubbard's. It comes up brawn, striped with wet. I could detect its progress beneath, in shallow water, by the bubbles which came up From the hill, the river and meadow is about equally water and ice,—rich, blue water, and islands or continents of white ice, no longer ice in place. The distant mountains are all white with snow, while our landscape is nearly bare.

Another year I must observe the alder and willow sap as early as the middle of February at least Nowadays, where snow-banks have partly melted against the banks by the roadside in low ground, I see in the grass numerous galleries where the mice or moles have worked in the winter.

March 11, 1855. At this season, before grass springs to conceal them, I notice those pretty little roundish shells on the tops of hills; one to-day on Anursnack.

I see pitch pine needles looking as if whitewashed, thickly covered on each of the two slopes of the needle with narrow white oyster-shell-like latebrae or chrysalids of insects.