Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/88

74 and blossom, more intimately, nearer its fountain head, the fancy sketches and designs of the artist. It is more simple and primitive growth; as if for ages sand and clay might have thus flowed into the forms of foliage, before plants were produced to clothe the earth.

I observed this afternoon the old Irish woman at the shanty in the woods, sitting out on the hillside bare-headed in the rain, and on the icy, though thawing ground, knitting. She comes out like the ground squirrel, at the least intimation of warmer weather, while I walk still in a great coat, and under an umbrella. She will not have to go far to be buried, so close she lives to the earth. Such Irish as these are naturalizing themselves at a rapid rate, and threaten at last to displace the Yankees, as the latter have the Indians. The process of acclimation is rapid with them. They draw long breaths in the American sick-room. There is a low mist in the woods. It is a good day to study lichens. The view so confined, it compels your attention to near objects, and the white background reveals the disks of the lichens distinctly. They appear more loose, flowing, expanded, flattened out, the colors brighter for the damp. The round, greenish-yellow lichens on the white pines loom through the mist (or are seen dimly) like shields whose devices you