Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/89

Rh would fain read. The trees appear all at once covered with the crop of lichens and mosses of all kinds. This is their solstice, and your eyes run swiftly through the mist to these things only. On every fallen twig even, that has lain under the snows, as well as on the trees, they appear erect, and now first to have attained their full expansion. Nature has a day for each of her creations. To-day it is an exhibition of lichens at Forest Hall. The livid green of some, the fruit of others, they eclipse the trees they cover; the red, club-shaped (baobab tree-like), on the stumps, the erythrean stumps; ah, beautiful is decay. True, as Thales said, the world was made out of water. That is the principle of all things.

I do not lay myself open to my friends? The owner of the casket locks it and unlocks it.—Treat your friends for what you know them to be. Regard no surfaces. Consider not what they did but what they intended. Be sure, as you know them, you are known of them again. Last night I treated my dearest friend ill. Though I could find some excuse for myself, it is not such excuse as under the circumstances could be pleaded in so many words. Instantly, I blamed myself, and sought an opportunity to make atonement, but the friend avoided me, and with kinder feelings even than before I was obliged