Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/394

380 of a triangular form, like a shoulder-of-mutton (?) sail, slightly scalloped, like shells. They looked like a fleet of a thousand mackerel fishers under a press of sail, careering before a smacking breeze. Sometimes the sun and wind had reduced them to the thinness of writing paper, and they fluttered and rustled and tinkled merrily. I skated through them and scattered their wrecks around. Every half mile or mile, as you skate up the river, you see these crystal fleets.

Again I saw to-day half a mile off in Sudbury a sandy spot on the top of a hill, where I prophesied that I should find traces of the Indians. When within a dozen rods, I distinguished the foundation of a lodge, and merely passing over it, I saw many fragments of the arrowhead stone. I have frequently distinguished these localities half a mile off, gone forward, and picked up arrowheads.

Saw in a warm, muddy brook in Sudbury, quite open and exposed, the skunk-cabbage spathes above water. The tops of the spathes were frost-bitten, but the fruit sound. There was one partly expanded, the first flower of the season, for it is a flower. I doubt if there is a month without its flower.

In society, in the best institutions of men, I remark a certain precocity. When we should