Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/167

Rh its stem, the speckled black alder, the rapid growing dogwood, the pale brown and cracked blueberry, etc. Even a little shining bud which lies sleeping behind its twig, perhaps half concealed by ice, is object enough. I feel myself upborne on the andromeda bushes beneath the snow as on a springy basket-work. Then down I go, up to my middle in the deep but silent snow, which has no sympathy with my mishap. Beneath its level, how many sweet berries will be hanging next August!—This freezing weather I see the pumps dressed in mats and old clothes, or bundled up in straw. Fortunate he who has placed his cottage on the south side of some high hill or some dense wood, and not in the middle of the Great Fields where there is no hill nor tree to shelter it. There the winds have full sweep, and such a day as yesterday, the house is but a fence to stay the drifting snow. Such is the piercing wind, no man loiters between his house and barn. The road track is soon obliterated, and the path which leads round to the back of the house, dug this morning, is filled up again, and you can no longer see the tracks of the master of the house who only an hour ago took refuge in some half-subterranean apartment there. You know only by some white wreath of smoke from his chimney, which is at once snapped up by the hungry air, that he sits