Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/88

74 has, to some extent, frozen dry, for the drying of the earth goes on in the cold night as well as the warm day. The alders and hedge-rows are still silent, emit no notes. According to G. B. Emerson, maple sap sometimes begins to flow in the middle of February, but usually in the second week in March, especially in a clear bright day with a westerly wind, after a frosty night I saw trout glance in the Mill Brook this afternoon, though near its sources in Hubbard's Close it is still covered with dark icy snow, and the river into which it empties has not broken up. Can they have come up from the sea? Like a film or shadow they glance before the eye, and you see where the mud is roiled by them I see the skunk cabbage started about the spring at head of Hubbard's Close, amid the green grass, and what looks like the first probing of the skunk The ponds are hard enough for skating again. Heard and saw the first blackbird flying east over the Deep Cut, with a tchuck-tchuck, and finally a split whistle.

March 6, 1855. To Second Division Brook Observed a mouse's nest in Second Division meadow, where it had been made under the snow, a nice, warm, globular nest, some five inches in diameter amid the sphagnum, cranberry vines, etc., made of dried grass and lined