74 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
has, to some extent, frozen dry, for the drying 
of the earth goes on in the cold night as well as 
the warm day. The alders and hedge-rows are 
still silent, emit no notes. According to G. B. 
Emerson, maple sap sometimes begins to flow 
in the middle of February, but usually in the 
second week in March, especially in a clear 
bright day with a westerly wind, after a frosty 
night.I saw trout glance in the Mill 
Brook this afternoon, though near its sources in 
Hubbard’s Close it is still covered with dark 
icy snow, and the river into which it empties 
has not broken up. Can they have come up 
from the sea ? Like a film or shadow they 
glance before the eye, and you see where the 
mud is roiled by them. .... I see the skunk 
cabbage started about the spring at head of 
Hubbard’s Close, amid the green grass, and 
what looks like the first probing of the skunk. 
. . . . The ponds are hard enough for skating 
again. Heard and saw the first blackbird fly¬ 
ing east over the Deep Cut, with a tchuck- 
tchuck , and finally a split whistle. 
March 6, 1855. To Second Division Brook. 
. . . . Observed a mouse’s nest in Second Di¬ 
vision meadow, where it had been made under 
the snow, a nice, warm, globular nest, some five 
inches in diameter amid the sphagnum, cran¬ 
berry vines, etc., made of dried grass and lined 
