234 EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS. 
tice the paths made by the musk-rats when the 
water was high in the winter leading from the 
river up the bank to a bed of grass above or 
below the surface. When it runs under the sur¬ 
face I frequently slump into it, and can trace it 
to the bed by the hollow sound when I stamp 01T 
the frozen ground. They have disfigured the 
banks very much in some places the past winter. 
Clams have been carried into these galleries a 
rod or more under the earth. When the ice 
still remained thick over the galleries, after the 
water had gone down, they kept on the surface 
and terminated, perhaps, at some stump where 
the earth was a little raised. 
March 26, 1856. The Romans introduced 
husbandry into England where but little was 
practiced before, and the English have intro¬ 
duced it into America. So we may well read 
the Roman authors for a history of this art as 
practiced by us. 
I am sometimes affected by the consideration 
that a man may spend the whole of his life after 
boyhood in accomplishing a particular design, 
as if he were put to a special and petty use, 
without taking time to look around him and 
appreciate the phenomenon of his existence. If 
so many purposes are thus necessarily left un¬ 
accomplished, perhaps unthought of, we are re¬ 
minded of the transient interest we have in this 
