Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/433

Rh grass and twigs on the side of this elevated hollow. When the leaves on the forest floor are dried and begin to rustle under such a sun and wind as these, the news is told to how many myriads of grubs that underlie them! When I perceive this dryness under my feet, I feel as if I had got a new sense, or rather I realize what was incredible to me before, that there is a new life in nature beginning to awake. It is whispered through all the aisles of the forest that another spring is approaching. The wood mouse listens at the mouth of his burrow, and the chickadee passes the news along. We now notice the snow on the mountains, because on the remote rim of the horizon its whiteness contrasts with the russet and darker hues of our bare fields. I looked at the Peterboro mountains, with my glass, from Fair Haven hill. I think there can be no more arctic scene than these mountains, on the edge of the horizon, completely crusted over with snow, the sun shining on them, seen through a telescope over bare russet fields and dark forests, with perhaps a house on some bare ridge seen against them. They look like great loaves incrusted with pure white sugar, and I think this must have been the origin of the name &quot;sugar-loaf&quot; sometimes given to mountains, and not their form. We look thus from russet fields into a landscape still sleeping under