Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/68

54 the north blows the snow almost horizontally, and beside freezing you, almost takes your breath away. The driving snow blinds you, and when you are protected, you can see but a little way, it is so thick. Yet in spite of or on account of it all, I see the first flock of arctic snow-birds, Emberiza nivalis, near the depot, white and black, with a sharp whistle-like note.

What a contrast between the village street now and as it was last summer; the leafy elms then resounding with the warbling vireo, robins, bluebirds, the fiery hangbird, etc., to which the villagers, kept in doors by the heat, listened through open lattices. Now it is like a street in Nova Zembla, if they were to have any there. I wade to the post office as solitary a traveler as ordinarily in a wood-path in winter. The snow is mid-leg deep, while drifts as high as one's head are heaped against the houses and fences, and here and there range across the street like snowy mountains. There is not a track leading from any door to indicate that the inhabitants have been forth to-day, any more than there is the track of any quadruped by the wood-paths. It is all pure, untrodden snow, banked up against the houses now at 4 ... In one place the drift covers the front yard fence, and stretches thence upward to the top of the front door, shutting all in. Frequently the