Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/69

Rh snow lies banked up three or four feet high against the front doors, there is a drift over each window, and the clapboards are all hoary with it. It is as if the inhabitants were all frozen to death, and now you threaded the desolate streets, weeks after that calamity. There is not a sleigh or vehicle of any kind on the Milldam; but one saddled horse on which a farmer has come into town. Yet they are warmer, merrier than ever there within. At the post office they ask each traveler news of the cars, is there any train up or down, how deep the snow is on a level.

Of the snow bunting, Wilson says that they appear in the northern parts of the United States &quot;early in December, or with the first heavy snow, particularly if drifted by high winds.&quot; This day answers to that description exactly. The wind is northerly. He adds that, &quot;they are universally considered as the harbingers of severe cold weather.&quot; They come down from the extreme north, and are common to the two continents. He quotes Pennant as saying that they &quot;inhabit not only Greenland, but even the dreadful climate of Spitzbergen where vegetation is nearly extinct, and scarcely any but cryptogamous plants are found. It therefore excites wonder how birds which are graminivorous in every other than those frost-bound regions