Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/93

Rh are, why the developments should be so paltry. These facts appear to float in the atmosphere insignificant as the spomles of fungi and impinge on my thallus. Some neglected surface of my mind affords a basis for them, and hence a parasitic growth. We should wash ourselves clean of such news. Methinks I should hear with indifference if a trustworthy messenger were to inform me that the sun drowned himself last night.

March 7, 1858. What is the earliest sign of spring? The motion of worms and insects? The flow of sap in trees and the swelling of buds? Do not the insects awake with the flow of the sap? Bluebirds, etc., probably do not come till the insects come out. Or are there earlier signs in the water, the tortoises, frogs, etc.? The little cup and cocciferæ lichens mixed with other cladonias of the reindeer moss kind are full of fresh fruit to-day. The scarlet apothecia of the cocciferæ on the stumps and earth partly covered with snow with which they contrast, I never saw more fresh and brilliant. But they shrivel up and lose their brightness by the time you get them home. The only birds I see to-day are the lesser red-polls. I have not seen a fox-colored sparrow or a Fringilla hiemalis.

March 7, 1854. To Anursnack Heard the first bluebird, something like pe