152 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
that peculiar drawling note of a hen who has 
this hennish way of expressing her content at 
the sight of bare ground and mild weather. 
The crowing of cocks and cawing of crows tell 
the same story. .... 
How conversant the Indian, who lived out of 
doors, must have been with mouse ear leaves, 
pine needles, mosses, and lichens which form 
the crust of the earth. No doubt he had names 
accordingly for many things for which we have 
no popular names. 
I walk in muddy fields hearing the tinkle of 
the new-born rills. Where the melted snow 
has made a swift rill in the rut of a cart-path, 
flowing over an icy bottom, and between icy 
banks, I see, just below a little fall an inch high, 
a circular mass of foam or white bubbles nearly 
two inches in diameter, slowly revolving, but 
never moving off. The swift stream at the 
fall appears to strike one side, as it might the 
side of a water wheel, and so cause it to revolve ; 
but in the angle between this and the fall half 
an inch distant, is another circle of bubbles, re¬ 
volving very rapidly in the opposite direction. 
The laws, perchance, by which the world was 
made, and according to which the systems re¬ 
volve, are seen in full operation in a rill of 
melted snow. 
March 16, 1859. p. m. Launch my boat 
