286 
WALDEN. 
sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged 
brother of the cat. There was only a narrow slit left 
between their lids, by which he preserved a peninsular 
relation to me; thus, with half-shut eyes, looking out 
from the land of dreams, 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 
north-west 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 mid-winter, some warm and springy swamp where 
