Where the last year's shoots or tops of the young white maples are brought together, as I walk toward a mass of them, one quarter of a mile off, with the sun on them, they present a fine dull scarlet streak. Young twigs are thus more fluid than the old wood, as if from their nearness to the flower, or like the complexion of children. You see thus a fine dash of red or scarlet against the distant hills which near at hand, or in the midst, is wholly unobservable. I go listening, but in vain, for the warble of the bluebird from the old orchard across the river. I love to look now at the fine-grained russet hillsides in the sun, ready to relieve and contract with, the azure of the bluebirds. I made a burning glass of ice which produced a slight sensation of warmth on the back of my hand, but was so irregular that it did not concentrate the rays to a sufficiently small focus. Returning over Great Fields found half a dozen arrowheads, one with three scollops in the base. . . . . Heard two hawks scream. There was something truly March-like in it, like a prolonged blast or whistling of the wind through a crevice in the sky, which, like a cracked blue saucer, overlaps the woods. Such are the first rude notes which prelude the summer's choir, learned of the whistling March wind.
March 2, 1856. Walking up the river by
