Page:Winter - from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau.djvu/98

84 communicate itself that I should not believe a friend, if he should tell me that he had given credit to an unjust rumor concerning me. Suspect! Ah, yes, you may suspect a thousand things, but I well know that what you suspect most confidently of all is just the truth. Your other doubts but flavor this your main suspicion. They are the condiments which, taken alone, do simply bite the tongue.

Jan. 1, 1853. This morning we have something between ice and frost on the trees, etc. The rocks cased in ice look like alum rocks. This, not frozen mist or frost, but frozen drizzle, collected around the slightest cores, gives prominence to the least withered herbs and grasses. Where yesterday was a plain, smooth field appears now a teeming crop of fat, icy herbage. The stems of the herbs on the north side are enlarged from ten to one hundred times. The addition is so universally on the north side that a traveler could not lose the points of the compass to-day, though it should be never so dark; for every blade of grass would serve to guide him, telling from which side the storm came yesterday. These straight stems of grasses stand up like white batons, or sceptres, and make a conspicuous foreground to the landscape, from six inches to three feet high. C. thought that these fat, icy branches on the withered grass and