Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/166

152 that peculiar drawling note of a hen who has this hennish way of expressing her content at the sight of bare ground and mild weather. The crowing of cocks and cawing of crows tell the same story

How conversant the Indian, who lived out of doors, must have been with mouse ear leaves, pine needles, mosses, and lichens which form the crust of the earth. No doubt he had names accordingly for many things for which we have no popular names.

I walk in muddy fields hearing the tinkle of the new-born rills. Where the melted snow has made a swift rill in the rut of a cart-path, flowing over an icy bottom, and between icy banks, I see, just below a little fall an inch high, a circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly two inches in diameter, slowly revolving, but never moving off. The swift stream at the fall appears to strike one side, as it might the side of a water wheel, and so cause it to revolve; but in the angle between this and the fall half an inch distant, is another circle of bubbles, revolving very rapidly in the opposite direction. The laws, perchance, by which the world was made, and according to which the systems revolve, are seen in full operation in a rill of melted snow.

March 16, 1859. Launch my boat