Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/114

100 These fat roots made much flame and a very black smoke, commencing where the flame left off, which cast fine flickering shadows on the rocks. There was some bluish-white smoke from the rotten part of the wood. Then there was the fine white ashes which farmers wives sometimes use for pearlash.

Jan. 2, 1854. The tints of the sunset sky are never purer and more ethereal than in the coldest winter days. This evening, though the colors are not brilliant, the sky is crystalline, and the pale fawn-tinged clouds are very beautiful. I wish to get on to a hill to look down on the winter landscape. We go about these days as if we were in fetters; we walk in the stocks, stepping into the holes made by our predecessors. The team and driver have long since gone by, but I see the marks of his whiplash on the snow, its recoil; but, alas! these are not a complete tally of the strokes which fell upon the oxen s back. The unmerciful driver thought, perhaps, that no one saw him, but unwittingly he recorded each blow on the unspotted snow behind his back as in a book of life. To more searching eyes the marks of his lash are in the air. I paced partly through the pitch-pine wood, and partly the open field from the turnpike by the Lee place to the railroad from N. to S., more than one fourth of a mile,