326 
WALDEN. 
with incense, through which the traveller picks his way 
from islet to islet, cheered by the music of a thousand 
tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the 
blood of winter which they are bearing off. 
Few phenomena gave me more delight than to ob¬ 
serve the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in 
flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad 
through which I passed on my way to the village, a 
phenomenon not very common on so large a scale, 
though the number of freshly exposed banks of the right 
material must have been greatly multiplied since rail¬ 
roads were invented. The material was sand of every 
degree of fineness and of various rich colors, commonly 
mixed with a little clay. When the frost comes out in 
the spring, and even in a thawing day in the winter, the 
sand begins to flow down the slopes like lava, sometimes 
bursting out through the snow and overflowing it where 
no sand was to be seen before. Innumerable little 
streams overlap and interlace one with another, exhibit¬ 
ing a sort of hybrid product, which obeys half way the 
law of currents, and half way that of vegetation. As it 
flows it takes the forms of sappy leaves or vines, mak¬ 
ing heaps of pulpy sprays a foot or more in depth, and 
resembling, as you look down on them, the laciniated 
lobed and imbricated thalluses of some lichens; or you 
are reminded of coral, of leopards’ paws or birds’ feet, 
of brains or lungs or bowels, and excrements of all kinds. 
It is a truly grotesque vegetation, whose forms and color 
we see imitated in bronze, a sort of architectural foliage 
more ancient and typical than acanthus, chiccory, ivy, 
vine, or any vegetable leaves; destined perhaps, under 
some circumstances, to become a puzzle to future geolo¬ 
gists. The whole cut impressed me as if it were a cave 
