drafty mountain hut

Still very cold. The most splendid show of ice chandeliers, casters, hour-glasses that I ever saw or imagined about the piers of the bridges, surpassing any crystal, so large. Rather like the bases of columns,

— terraced pedestals, that is it,- the prototypes of the ornaments of the copings and capitals. Perfect and regular, sharp, cone-shaped drops hang from the first figure a few inches above the water. I should have described it then. It would have filled many pages. Scared up my flock of black ducks and counted forty together. See crows along the water’s edge. What do they eat Saw a small black duck with glass, — a dipper (?). Fair Haven still covered and frozen anew in part. Shores of meadow strewn with cranberries. The now silvery willow catkins (notwithstanding the severe cold) shine along the shore, over the cold water, and C. thinks some willow osiers decidedly more yellow.

from the journals of Henry David Thoreau