Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/234

220 Even the creaking of a wagon in a frosty night has music in it which allies it to the highest and purest strains of the muse.

Minott says his mother told him she had seen a deer come down the hill behind her house, where J. Moore's now is, and cross the road and the meadow in front. Thinks it may have been eighty years ago.

Jan. 21, 1857. It is remarkable how many tracks of foxes you will see quite near the village, where they have been in the night, and yet a regular walker will not glimpse one oftener than once in eight or ten years.

As I flounder along the Corner road against the root fence, a very large flock of snow buntings alight with a wheeling flight amid the weeds rising above the snow a hundred or two of them. They run restlessly amid the weeds, so that I can hardly get sight of them through my glass. Then suddenly all arise and fly only two or three rods, alighting within three rods of me. They keep up a constant twittering. It is as if they were ready any instant for a longer flight, but their leader had not so ordered it. Suddenly away they sweep again, and I see them alight in a distant field where the weeds rise above the snow, but in a few minutes they have left that also, and gone farther north. Beside their rippling note, they have a vibratory twitter,