Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/418

404 is getting out his ice with a cross-cut saw, while his oxen are eating their stalks. I noticed that the ice which Garrison cut the other day contained the lily pads and stems within it. How different their environment now from when the queenly flower, floating on the trembling surface, exhaled its perfume amid a cloud of insects!

What a contrast between the upper and under side of many leaves, the indurated and colored upper side, and the tender, more or less colorless under side, male and female, even when they are almost equally exposed. The under side is commonly white, however, as turned away from the light toward the earth. Many in which the contrast is finest are narrow, revolute leaves, like the delicate and beautiful andromeda polifolia, the ledum, kalmia glauca. The handsome lanceolate leaves of the andromeda polifolia, dark, but pure and uniform dull red above, strongly revolute, and of a delicate bluish-white beneath, deserve to be copied on works of art.

Feb. 18, 1857.  The frost out of the ground and the ways settled in many places. I am excited by this wonderful air, and go listening for the note of the bluebird or other comer. The very grain of the air seems to have undergone a change, and is ready to split into the form of the bluebird's warble. Methinks if