Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/45

Rh ice button, like a glass knob, through which you see the reflections of the brown calyx. These are very common.—Each little blue curl calyx has a spherical button, like those over a little boy's jacket, little sprigs of them, and the pennyroyal has still smaller spheres more regularly arranged about its stem, chandelier-wise, and still smells through the ice. The finest grasses support the most wonderful burdens of ice and most bunched on their minute threads. These weeds are spread and arched over into the snow again, countless little arches a few inches high, each cased in ice, which you break with a tinkling crash at each step.—The scarlet fruit of the cockspur lichen, seen glowing through the more opaque whitish or snowy crust of a stump, is, on close inspection, the richest sight of all, for the scarlet is increased and multiplied by reflection through the bubbles and hemispherical surfaces of the crust, as if it covered some vermilion grain thickly strewn. The brown cup lichens stand in their midst. The whole rough bark, too, is incased.

Already a squirrel has perforated the crust above the mouth of his burrow here and there, by the side of the path, and left some empty acorn shells on the snow. He has shoveled out this morning before the snow has frozen on his doorstep.

Particularly are we attracted in the winter by