Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/175

Rh that he has traveled farther than to the sources of the Nile, that he has been out of town, out of the house, not that he can tell a good story, but that he can keep a good silence. Has he attended to a silence more significant than any story? Did he ever get out of the road which all men and fools travel? You call yourself a great traveler, perhaps, but can you get beyond the influence of a certain class of ideas?

Jan. 11, 1859. At 6 —22°, and how much lower I know not, the mercury [?] in our thermometer having gone into the bulb, but that is said to be the lowest. Going to Boston to-day, I find that the cracking of the ground last night is the subject of conversation in the cars, and that it was quite general. I see many cracks in Cambridge and Concord. It would appear, then, that the ground cracks on the advent of very severe cold weather. I had not heard it before this winter. It was so when I went to Amherst a winter or two ago.

Jan. 11, 1861. H M brings me the contents of a crow's stomach in alcohol. It was killed in the village within a day or two. It is quite a mass of frozen-thawed apple pulp and skin, with a good many pieces of skunk-cabbage berries, a quarter of an inch or less in diameter, and commonly showing the pale brown or blackish outside, interspersed, looking like bits of