To Abner Buttrick and Tarbell Hills.

  See a flock of large ducks in a line,—maybe black?—over Great Meadows; also a few sheldrakes.

  It was pleasant to hear the tinkling of very coarse brash—broken honeycombed dark ice—rattling one piece against another along the northeast shores, to which it has drifted.

  Scarcely any ice now about river except what rests on the bottom of the meadows, dirty with sediment . . . .

  C. [William Ellery Channing] says that Walden began to be hard to get on to the first of March. I saw this afternoon a meadow below Flint’s willow-row still frozen over (at 3 P.M.) . . .