Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/260

246 slightest conceivable smooth fall over a dam. I must ask the water-bug that glides across it. Ah, if I had no more sins to answer for than a water-bug! They are only the small water-bugs that I see. They are earlier in the spring and apparently hardier than the others.

Between winter and summer there is to my mind an immeasurable interval. When I pry into the old bank swallow holes to-day, see the marks of their bills, and even whole eggs left at the bottom, these things affect me as the phenomena of a former geological period. Yet perchance the very swallow which laid those eggs will revisit this hole next spring. The upper side of her gallery is a low arch quite firm and durable.

Jan. 24, 1859. I see an abundance of caterpillars of various kinds on the ice of the meadows, many of them large, dark, hairy, with longitudinal light stripes, somewhat like the common apple one. Many of them are frozen in still, some for two thirds their length, though all are alive. Yet it has been so cold since the rise that you can now cross the channel almost anywhere.—I also see a great many of those little brown grasshoppers, and one perfectly green, some of them frozen in, but generally on the surface, showing no sign of life, yet when I brought them home to experiment on, I found