Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/311

Rh have singularly wild and suspicious ways. You will see a couple flying high, as if about their business, but, lo, they turn and circle over your head again and again for a mile, and this is their business, as if a mile and an afternoon were nothing for them to throw away; this even in winter when they have no nests to be anxious about. But it is affecting to hear them cawing about their ancient seat which the choppers are laying low.

The snow flea seems to be a creature whose summer and prime of life is a thaw in the winter. It seems not merely to enjoy this interval like other animals, but then chiefly to exist. It is the creature of the thaw. Moist snow is its element. That thaw which merely excites the cock to sound his clarion, as it were, calls to life the snow flea.

Jan. 31, 1852. I am repeatedly astonished by the coolness and obtuse bigotry with which some will appropriate the New Testament in conversation with you. It is as if they were to appropriate the sun, and stand between you and it, because they understood you had walked once by moonlight, though that was in the reflected light of the sun which you could not get directly. I have seen two persons conversing at a tea-table, both lovers of the New Testament, each in his own way, the one a lover of all