of those fruit-trees or
timber-trees that acquire a grace with their old age. Last Spring found
this house solitary for the first time since it was built; and now again
she peeps into our open windows and finds new faces here....

It is remarkable how much uncleanness winter brings with it, or leaves
behind it.... The yard, garden, and avenue, which should be my
department, require a great amount of labor. The avenue is strewed with
withered leaves,--the whole crop, apparently, of last year,--some of
which are now raked into heaps; and we intend to make a bonfire of
them.... There are quantities of decayed branches, which one tempest
after another has flung down, black and rotten. In the garden are the
old cabbages which we did not think worth gathering last autumn, and the
dry bean-vines, and the withered stalks of the asparagus-bed; in short,
all the wrecks of the departed year,--its mouldering relics, its dry
bones. It is a pity that the world cannot be made over anew every
spring. Then, in the yard, there are the piles of firewood, which I
ought to have sawed and thrown into the shed long since, but which will
cumber the earth, I fear, till June, at least. Quantities of chips are
strewn about, and on removing them we find the yellow stalks of grass
sprouting underneath. Nature does her best to beautify this disarray.
The grass springs up most industriously, especially in sheltered and
sunny angles of the buildings, or round the door-steps,--a locality
which seems particularly favorable to its growth; for it is already high
enough to bend over and wave in the wind. I was surprised to observe
that some weeds (especially a plant that stains the fingers with its
yellow juice) had lived, and retained their freshness and sap as
perfectly as in summer, through all the frosts and snows of last winter.
I saw them, the last green thing, in the autumn; and here they are
again, the first in the spring.

* * * * *

_Thursday, April 27._--I took a walk into the fields, and round our
opposite hill, yesterday noon, but made no very remarkable observation.
The frogs have begun their concerts, though not as yet with a full
choir. I found no violets nor anemones, nor anything in the likeness of
a flower, though I looked carefully along the shelter of the stone
walls, and in all spots apparently propitious. I ascended the hill, and
had a wide prospect of a swollen river, extending around me in a
semici