Returning, saw near Island a shrike glide by, cold and blustering as it was, with a remarkably even and steady sail or gliding motion like a hawk . . .

  Mr. Emerson, [Ralph Waldo Emerson] who returned last week from lecturing on the Mississippi, having been gone but a month, tells me that he saw boys skating on the Mississippi and on Lake Erie and on the Hudson, and has no doubt they are skating on Lake Superior; and probably at Boston he saw them skating on the Atlantic . . .