January 23

Winter Rain

Sunday. Rain, carrying off the snow and making slosh of the lower half of it. It is perhaps the wettest walking we ever have. (1853)

Tracks in the Snow

When approaching the pond yesterday, through my bean-field, I saw where some fishermen had come away, and the tails of their string of pickerel had trailed on the deep snow where they sank in it.

I afterward saw where they had been fishing that forenoon, the water just beginning to freeze, and also where some had fished the day before with red-finned minnows, which were frozen into an inch of ice; that these men had chewed tobacco and ate apples. All this I knew, though, I saw neither man nor squirrel nor pickerel nor crow. (1856)

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