Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/192

178. There was nothing but these two distinct black manikins and the branch of the elm over our heads to be seen. The bubbles rapidly burst and succeeded one another.

March 19, 1854. Cold and windy. The meadow ice bears where the water is shallow Saw in Mill Brook three or four shiners (the first), poised over the sand, with a distinct longitudinal, light-colored line midway along their sides and a darker line below it. This is a noteworthy and characteristic lineament, a cypher, a hieroglyphic, or type of spring. You look into some clear, sandy-bottomed brook, where it spreads into a deeper bay, yet flowing cold from ice and snow not far off, and see indistinctly poised over the sand, on invisible fins, the outlines of a shiner, scarcely to be distinguished from the sand behind it, as if it were transparent, or as if the material of which it was builded had all been picked up from there, chiefly distinguished by the lines I have mentioned.

March 19, 1856 the snow was constantly sixteen inches deep at least on a level in open land from January 13 to March 13.

March 19, 1858. To Hill and Grackle Swamp. Another pleasant and warm day. Painted my boat this These spring impressions (as of the apparent waking up of the