reams, and endeavoring
to realize me, vague object or mote that interrupted his visions. At
length, on some louder noise or my nearer approach, he would grow uneasy
and sluggishly turn about on his perch, as if impatient at having his
dreams disturbed; and when he launched himself off and flapped through
the pines, spreading his wings to unexpected breadth, I could not hear
the slightest sound from them. Thus, guided amid the pine boughs rather
by a delicate sense of their neighborhood than by sight, feeling his
twilight way, as it were, with his sensitive pinions, he found a new
perch, where he might in peace await the dawning of his day.

As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the
meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere
has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek,
heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much better
by the carriage road from Brister's Hill. For I came to town still, like
a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all
piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed
to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new
drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy
northwest wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle
in the road, and not a rabbit's track, nor even the fine print, the
small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to
find, even in midwinter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass
and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some
hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring.

Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at
evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door,
and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with
the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be
at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a
long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to
have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on
their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is
as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load
of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when
men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads;