Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/263

Rh or foam, filling and overflowing my hand to which they imparted a sensation of warmth quite remarkable. I could not tire of repeating the experiment. I think a single one would more than fill a half peck measure, if they lay as light as at first in the air. It is something magical to one who tries it for the first time. You do not know at first where it all comes from. It is the conjurer's trick in nature, equal to taking feathers enough to fill a bed out of a hat. When you had done, but yet scraped the almost bare stem, they still over flowed your hand as before. As the flowerets are opening and liberating themselves, showing their red extremities, it has the effect of a changeable color.

Ah, then, the brook beyond, its rippling wawaterswaters [sic] and its sunny sands. They made me forget that it was winter. Where springs oozed out of the soft bank over the dead leaves and the green sphagnum, they had melted the snow, or the snow had melted as it fell perchance, and the rabbits had sprinkled the mud about on the snow. The sun reflected from the sandy, gravelly bottom, sometimes a bright sunny streak no bigger than your finger reflected from a ripple as from a prism, and the sunlight reflected from a hundred points of the surface of the rippling brook, enabled me to realize summer.