Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/106

92 broad for their length, and commonly more on one side the midrib than the other. They are from an inch to an inch and a half long, and three fourths of an inch wide, and slanted, where I look, from the S. W. They have first a very distinct midrib, though so thin that they cannot be taken up; then distinct ribs branching from this, commonly opposite; and minute ribs springing again from these last, as in many ferns, the last running to each crenation in the border. How much farther they are subdivided the naked eye cannot discern. They are so thin and fragile that they melt under your breath while you are looking closely at them. A fisherman says they were much finer in the morning. In other places the ice is strewn with a different kind of frost-work, in little patches, as if oats had been spilled, like fibres of asbestos rolled, one half or three fourths of an inch long and one eighth or more wide. Here and there patches of them a foot or two over, like some boreal grain spilled.

Jan. 1, 1858. I have lately been surveying the Walden woods so extensively and minutely that I can see it mapped in my mind's eye as so many men's wood-lots, and am aware when I walk there that I am at a given moment passing from such a one's wood-lot to such an other's. I fear this particular dry knowledge