Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/384

370 inches in diameter, about the grass stems or willows, on the ice which froze last night. When I breathe on them, I find them all alive and ready to skip. Also the water, when I break the ice, arouses them.

I saw yesterday in a muddy spring in Tarbell's meadow many cockle shells on the bottom, with their feet out, and marks as if they had been moving.

When I read of the catkins of the alder and the willow, etc., scattering their yellow pollen, they impress me as a vegetation which belongs to the earliest and most innocent dawn of nature, as if they must have preceded other trees in the order of creation, as they precede them annually in their blossoming and leafing. For how many æons did the willow shed its yellow pollen annually before man was created!

In the winter we so value the semblance of fruit that even the dry, black female catkins of the alder are an interesting sight, not to mention, on shoots rising a foot or two above these, the red or mulberry male catkins in little parcels dangling at a less than right angle with the stems, and the short female ones at their bases.

Apparently I read Cato and Yarro from the same motives that Virgil did, and as I read the almanac, the &quot;N. E. Farmer,&quot; or &quot;Cultivator,&quot; or Howitt's &quot;Seasons.&quot;