Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/274

260 and five times a day I can be whirled to Boston in an hour.

A slight fine snow has fallen in the night and drifted before the wind. I observe that it is so distributed over the ice as to show equal spaces of bare ice and of snow at pretty regular distances. I have seen the same phenomenon on the surface of snow in fields as if the little drifts disposed themselves according to the same law that makes waves of water. There is now a fine steam-like snow blowing over the ice, which continually lodges here and there, and forthwith a little drift accumulates. But why does it lodge at such regular intervals? I see this fine drifting snow in the air, ten or twelve feet high at a distance. Perhaps it may have to do with the manner in, or the angle at, which the wind strikes the earth.

Jan. 26, 1855.  A thick driving snow, something like, but less than, that of the 19th. There is a strong easterly wind. I am afraid I have not described vividly enough the aspect of that lodging snow of the 19th and to-day partly. Imagine the innumerable twigs and boughs of the forest, as you stand in its midst, crossing each other at every conceivable angle on every side, from the ground to thirty feet in height, with each its zigzag wall of snow four or five inches high, so innumerable at