Got some excellent frozen-thawed apples off of Annursnack, soft and luscious as a custard and free from worms and rot. Saw a partridge budding, but they did not appear to have pecked the apples. There was a remarkable sunset; a mother-of-pearl sky seen over the Price farm; some small clouds, as well as the edges of large ones, most brilliantly painted with mother-of-pearl tints through and through. I never saw the like before. Who can foretell the sunset,—what it will be? The near and bare hills covered with snow look like mountains, but the mountains in the horizon do not look higher than hills. I frequently see a hole in the snow where a partridge has squatted, the mark or form of her tail very distinct. The chivalric and heroic spirit, which once belonged to the chevalier or rider only, seems now to reside in the walker. To represent the chivalric spirit we have no longer a knight, but a walker, errant.[112] I speak not of pedestrianism, or of walking a thousand miles in a thousand successive hours. The Adam who daily takes a turn in his garden. Methinks I would not accept of the gift of life, if I were required to spend as large a portion of it sitting foot up or with my legs crossed, as the shoemakers and tailors do. As well be tied neck and heels together and cast into the sea. Making acquaintance with my extremities. I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of taking walks daily,—not [to] exercise the legs or body merely, nor barely to recruit the spirits, but positively to exercise both body and spirit, and to succeed to the highest and worthiest ends by the abandonment of all specific ends,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering. And this word “saunter,” by the way, is happily derived “from idle people who roved about the country [in the Middle Ages][113] and asked charity under pretence of going _à la Sainte Terre_,” to the Holy Land, till, perchance, the children exclaimed, “There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_,” a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds.[114] * * * * * [Four pages missing.]