1893
April 7
(No 4)
Concord, Mass.
  Late in the afternoon I walked to Derby's lane.
It was still snowing fast and fully five metres
of damp snow covered the ground making the
walking [deleted]both[/deleted] laborious and very slippery. The wind was
S. E. and of moderate strength.
Fox Sparrows and Song Sparrows were scattered about
everywhere two or three in a place, both species
singing rather freely in spite of the storm. I 
saw only two Robins. A Flicker was calling in
an orchard and a disconsolate-looking Phoebee
flitting about in some sumac bushes under the
lee of a bank. 
[margin]Derby's Lane[/margin]
  Derby's lane was never more beautiful than when
I entered it this afternoon, but it looked even
more wintry than the spotters fields. The pines
and hemlocks were laden with snow and fine
snow dust blown from their upper branches filled
the air and sifted down over everything below. The
path was trackless save where a dog (a hound
that I heard baying in the distance, probably) had
crossed it and a Gray Squirrel ventured out a
few feet to dig for a buried nut.
Two Crows came circling over me, cawing angrily
as if they were already nesting, and a Red-tailed
Hawk flapped hurriedly from the upper branches of
a pine and made off through the snow obscured air
over the meadow on the left. These were the 
only birds that I saw or heard in these woods.