13 June 1853 – 19 June 1853

9 a. mM. —'To Orchis Swamp.

P. M.— To White Pond. Herd’s-grass heads. The warmest afternoon as yet. Ground getting dry, it is so long since we had any rain to speak of. C. says he saw a “lurker” yesterday in the woods on the Marlborough road. He heard a distressing noise like a man sneezing but long continued, but at length found it was a man wheezing. He was oldish and grizzled, the stumps of his grizzled beard about an inch long, and his clothes in the worst possible condition, — a wretched-looking creature, an escaped convict hiding in the woods, perhaps. He appeared holding on to his paunch, and wheezing as if it would kill him. He appeared to have come straight through the swamp, and — what was most interesting about him, and proved him to be a lurker of the first class, —one of our party, as C. said, —he kept straight through a field of rye which was fully grown, not re- garding it in the least; and, though C. tried to con- ceal himself on the edge of the rye, fearing to hurt his feelings if the man should mistake him for the proprietor, yet they met, and the lurker, giving him a short bow, disappeared in the woods on the opposite side of the road. He went through everything. Went to the Harrington Bathing-Place. Drank at the Tarbell Spring first. The swamp-pink by to-morrow. The Allium Canadense in Tarbell’s meadow. Wild meadow garlic, with its head of bulbs and a few flower- buds, not yet; apparently with cultivated onion. The desert at Dugan’s is all scored over with tor- toise-tracks, — two parallel dotted lines four or five inches apart, the impressions being nearly a half-inch deep, with the distinct mark of the tail making a wav- ing line between. It looks as if twenty tortoises had spent a night travelling over it; and here and there there were marks of a slight digging, but I found no eggs. They came out of the brook near by. Perhaps they select such a bare sandy tract for their encounters, where there is no grass to impede them. Perhaps it makes the most remarkable track of any creature. Sometimes the sand appeared as if dabbled and patted for a foot or more in diameter. Heard the first locust from amid the shrubs by the roadside. He comes with heat. Snake-sloughs are found nowadays; whitish and bleached they are. Beyond the rye-field on the Marlborough road, the oaks were extensively cut off by the frost some weeks ago. They are all dry and red for half a mile, — young trees eight or ten feet high, —as if a fire had run through them after they had grown two or three inches; and young red leaves are beginning to appear on them. Since the maples and birches are untouched (some- times a maple!), it looks as if the fire had run in veins. Yet most travellers, if they did not ride close to them, would not notice them, perhaps being used as yet even to a wintry landscape. Is that the indigo-bird that sings, between here and White Pond, a-chit chit- chit awee? Perhaps the andromeda swamp on this path is as handsome as any, appearing so far down from the hills and still so level. I observed the cotton of aphides on the alders yesterday and to-day. How regularly these phenomena appear! — even the stains or spots or galls on leaves, as that bright yellow on blackberry leaves, now common, and those crimson ring-spots on maple leaves I see to-day, exactly the same pattern with last year’s, and the crimson frost- ing on the: black birch leaves I saw the other day. Then there are the huckleberry-apples, and the large green puffs on the panicled andromeda, and also T see now the very light or whitish solid and juicy apples on the swamp-pink, with a fungus-like smell when broken.’ Erigeron annuus (?),1 some white, some purplish, common now and daisylike. I put it rather early on the 9th. On the Strawberry Hill on the further side of White Pond, about fifty feet above the pond and a dozen rods from it, found a painted tortoise laying her eggs. Her posterior was inserted into a slight cavity she had dug in the sandy hillside. There were three eggs al- ready laid, the top of them hardly two inches below the surface. She had dug down about one and a half or two inches, somewhat in the form of the hind part of her shell, and then under the turf up the hill about two and a half inches, enlarging the cavity slightly within, leaving a neck of an oval form about seven eighths of an inch by one and a quarter inches, apparently packing the eggs with her tail. She lay still where I put her, while I examined her eggs, and I replaced her in the hole. A little further on, I saw where such a deposit had been broken up, apparently by a skunk, and the egg-shells strewn about. The whole hole about three inches deep. The three eggs already laid, about one inch long, cream-colored or slightly flesh-color, easily indented with the finger, but a little elastic, not exactly elliptical, but slightly larger at one end. C. says his dog chased a woodchuck yesterday, and it climbed up into an oak and sat on a limb ten or twelve feet high. He killed a young rabbit. ‘Took another bath at the cove in White Pond. We had already bathed in the North River at Harrington’s. It is about 5 p. M. The pond is perfectly smooth and very beautiful now. Its shores are still almost entirely uninjured by the axe. While we are dressing, the bullfrogs in this cove, it is so late in the day, are beginning to trump. They utter a short, laughable, belching sound from time to time and then break into a powerful trump as the whim takes them. The dog lies flat on his belly the while to cool him. We took an old leaky boat and a forked stick which had made part of a fence, and pushed out to see the shores from the middle of the pond. There sit the great paddocks in their yellow vests, imperturbable by the sides of the boat. See now the great stems of trees on the bottom and the stones curiously strewn about. Now we cross the bar to this cove; now we are leaving the edge of the heart-leaves, whose long, clean, slender, thread- like stems rise from the bottom still where six feet deep; and now the stones on the bottom grow dim, as if a mildew formed about them, and now the bottom is lost in the dim greenness of the water. How beautifully the northeast (?) shore curves! The pines and other trees so perfect on their water side. There is no rawness nor imperfection to the edge of the wood in this case, as where an axe has cleared, or a cultivated field abuts on it; but the eye rises by natural gradations from the low shrubs, the alders, of the shore to the higher trees. It is a natural selvage. It is comparatively unaffected by man. The water laves the shore as it did a thousand years ago.' Such curves in a wood bordering on a field do not affect us as when it is a winding shore of a lake. This is a firmer edge. It will not be so easily torn. Our boat leaked so, — faster and faster as it sank deeper and tipped with the water in it, — that we were 4 obliged to turn to the shore. The blue flag (ris versi- color) grows in this pure water, rising from the stony bottom all around the shores, and is very beautiful, — not too high-colored, — especially its reflections in the water. There was something [in] its bluish blade which harmonized with the greenish water.! The pollen of the pine yellowed the driftwood on the shore and the stems of bushes which stood in the water, and in little flakes extended out some distance on the surface, until at four or five rods in this cove it was suddenly and distinctly bounded by an invisible fence on the surface; but in the middle, as deep down as you could [see], there appeared some fine white par- ticles in the water, either this or something else and perhaps some ova of fishes. Instead of the white lily, which requires mud, or the sweet flag, here grows the blue flag in the water, thinly about the shore. ‘The color of the flower harmonizes singularly with the water.’ With our boat’s prow to the shore, we sat half an hour this evening listening to the bullfrogs. Their belching is my dumping sound more hoarsely heard near at hand. What imperturbable fellows! One sits perfectly still behind some blades of grass while the dog is chasing others within two feet. Some are quite handsome, large, spotted fellows. We see here and there light-colored greenish-white spots on the bottom where a fish, a bream perhaps, has picked away all the dead wood and leaves for her nest over a space of eight- een inches or more. Young breams from one to three inches long, light-colored and transparent, are swimming about, and here and there a leech in the shallow water, moving »~~+ as serpents are represented to do. Large devil’s-needles are buzzing back and forth. They skim along the edge of the blue flags, apparently quite round this cove or further, like hen-harriers beating the bush for game. And now comes a hummingbird humming from the woods and alights on the blossom of a blue flag. The bullfrogs begin with one or two notes and with each peal add another trill to their trump, — er-roonk, er-er-roonk, er-er-er-roonk, etc. I am amused to hear one after another, and then an unexpectedly deep and confident bass, as if he had charged himself with more wind than the rest. And now, as if by a general agreement, they all trump together, making a deafening noise. Sometimes one jumps up a foot out of water in the midst of these concerts. What are they about? Suddenly a tree-toad in the overhang- ing woods begins, and another answers, and another, with loud, ringing notes such as I never heard before, and in three minutes they are all silent again. A red- eye sings on a tree-top, and a cuckoo is heard far in the wood. These are the evening sounds. As we look over the water now, the opposite woods are seen dimly through what appears not so much the condensing dew and mist as the dry haziness of the afternoon, now settled and condensed. The woods on the opposite shore have not the distinct- ness they had an hour before, but perhaps a more agreeable dimness, a sort of gloaming or settling and thickening of the haze over the water, which melts tree into tree and masses them agreeably. The trees no longer bright and distinct, -——a bluish mistiness. This appears to be an earlier gloaming before sun- set, such as by and by is universal. Went through the woods along the old canal to Haynes’s pasture, from the height of which we looked down on the rich New Hampshire wood we had come out of. The ground rising within the wood gave it the appearance of woods rising by successive stages from a smaller growth on the edge to stately trees in the middle, and Nobscot was seen in the southwest through the blue furnace mist. This seems the true hour to be abroad sauntering far from home. Your thoughts being already turned toward home, your walk in one sense ended, you are in that favorable frame of mind described by De Quincey, open to great impressions, and you see those rare sights with the unconscious side of the eye, which you could not see * by a direct gaze before. Then the dews begin to de- scend in your mind, and its atmosphere is strained of all impurities; and home is farther away than ever. Here is home; the beauty of the world impresses you. There is a coolness in your mind as in a well. Life is too grand for supper. The wood thrush launches forth his evening strains from the midst of the pines. I admire the moderation of this master. There is nothing tumultuous in his song. He launches forth one strain with all his heart and life and soul, of pure and unmatchable melody, and then he pauses and gives the hearer and himself time to digest this, and then another and another at suitable intervals. Men talk of the rich song of other birds, — the thrasher, mockingbird, nightingale. But I doubt, I doubt. They know not what they say! There is as great an interval between the thrasher and the wood thrush as between Thomson’s “Seasons” and Homer. ‘The sweetness of the day crystallizes in this morning coolness. Probably the tortoise leaves her eggs thus near the surface and in sand that they may receive the great- est heat from the sand, being just deep enough for the sand to receive and retain it and not part with it at night, — not so deep as to be cool.

A great fog this morning. P. M. — To Trilihum Woods. Clover now in its prime. What more luxuriant than a clover-field? ‘The poorest soil that is covered with it loaks incomparably fertile. This is perhaps the most characteristic feature of June, resounding with the hum of insects. It is so massive, such a blush on the fields. The rude health of the sorrel cheek has given place to the blush of clover. Painters are wont, in their pic- tures of Paradise, to strew the ground too thickly with flowers. There should be moderation in all things. Though we love flowers, we do not want them so thick under our feet that we cannot walk without treading on them. But a clover-field in bloom is some excuse for them. The Prinos levigatus, it seems to be, probably the 14th, though it seems to have three or four pistils, if any, and six to nine stamens and petals. A small wheel-shaped white flower. The peduncles are some- times branched and have two flowers. Mvtchella repens just bursting, say to-day. Rose-bugs for a day or two. Here is one on a Viburnum nudum var. pyrifolium (? ). A strong southerly wind blows. Here are many wild roses northeast of Trillium Woods. We are liable to underrate this flower on account of its commonness. Is it not the queen of our flowers? How ample and high-colored its petals, glancing half concealed from its own green bowers! There is a cer- tain noble and delicate civility about it, — not wildness. It is properly the type of the Rosacee, or flowers among others of most wholesome fruits. It is at home in the garden, as readily cultivated as apples. It is the pride of June. In summing up its attractions I should men- tion its rich color, size, and form, the rare beauty of its bud, its fine fragrance, and the beauty of the en- tire shrub, not to mention the almost innumerable varieties it runs into. I bring home the buds ready to expand, put them in a pitcher of water, and the next morning they open and fill my chamber with fragrance. ‘This, found in the wilderness, must have reminded the Pilgrim of home. Strawberries in the meadow now ready for the picker. They le deep at the roots of the grass in the shade; else they are dried up. You spread aside the tall grass, and deep down in little cavities by the roots of the grass you find this rich fruit. But it is only a taste we get here. 5 p. m., I hear distinctly the sound of thunder in the northwest, but not a cloud is in sight, only a little thickness or mistiness in that horizon, and 1853) THE AWAKING OF THE BIRDS 257 we get no shower. For a week past I have heard the cool, watery note of the goldfinch, from time to time, as it twittered past.

4 a. Ms — To Nawshawtuct by boat. No fog this morning and scarcely any dew except in the lowest ground. There is a little air stirring, too; the breeze in the night must have been the reason. It threatens to be a hot, as well as dry, day, and gar- dens begin to suffer. Before 4 A. M., or sunrise, the sound of chip-birds and robins and bluebirds, etc., fills the air and is in- cessant. It is a crowing on the roost, methinks, as the cock crows before he goes abroad. They do not sing deliberately as at eve, but greet the morning with an incessant twitter. Even the crickets seem to join the concert. Yet I think it is not the same every morn- ing, though it may be fair. An hour or two later it is comparative silence. The awaking of the birds, a tumultuous twittering. At sunrise, however, a slight mist curls along the sur- face of the water. When the sun falls on it, it looks like a red dust. ' What is that tall rank grass now in bloom, four or five feet high, with an upright pyramidal spike, which some time ago I mistook for wild rice?! It stands amid the button-bushes on the edge of the river; leafy except the upper foot. From top of the hill, the sun, just above the horizon, red and shorn of beams, is somewhat pear-shaped, owing to some irregularity in the refraction of the lower strata, produced, as it were, by the dragging of the lower part; and then it becomes a broad ellipse, the lower half a dun red, owing to the grossness of the air. It appears as if it rose in the northeast, — over Ball’s Hill at any rate. The distant river is like molten silver at this hour; it merely reflects the light, not the blue. I hear the meow of Shaw’s peacock here, very loud. What shall I name that small cloud that at- tends the sun’s rising, that hangs over the portals of the day like an embroidered banner and heralds his coming, though sometimes it proves a portcullis which falls and cuts off the new day in its birth? Bathed in Assabet at Leaning Hemlocks and exam- ined the stone-heaps, now partly exposed to the air, but found nothing. Found four tortoises’ deposits on the high bank there just robbed and the eggs de- voured. He had not emptied the yolk out of one. The holes had been made exactly in all respects like that I have described. Some were put in pure sand. There were others which had been robbed some days. Ap- parently about three eggs to each. Presently I saw a skunk making off, — undoubtedly the robber, — with an undulating motion, a white streak above and a par- allel and broader black one below (?). A tick in woods by White Pond yesterday. A sweet-briar, ap- parently yesterday. The locusts on the hill are still white with blossoms, which also strew the ground far and wide as if a sleety snow had fallen, and also adhere to the trees. They resound with the hum of insects even at 5 A. M. Coming along near the celtis I heard a singular sound as of a bird in distress amid the bushes, and turned to relieve it. Next thought it a squirrel in an apple tree barking at me. Then found that it came from a hole in the ground under my feet, a loud sound between a grunting and a wheezing, yet not unlike the sound a red squirrel sometimes makes, but louder. Looking down the hole, I saw the tail and hind quarters of’ a woodchuck, which seemed to be contending with another further down. Reaching down carefully, I took hold of the tail, and, though I had to pull very hard indeed, I drew him out between the rocks, a bouncing great fat fellow, and tossed him a little way down the hill. As soon as he recovered from his bewilderment he made for the hole again, but, I barring the way, he ran off elsewhere. Coming down the river, heard opposite the new houses, where I stopped to pluck the tall grass, a sound as of young blackbirds amid the button-bushes. After a long while gazing, standing on the roots of the button-bushes, I detected a couple of meadow or mud hens (Rallus Virginianus) gliding about under the button-bushes over the mud and through the shallow water, and uttering a squeaking or squawking note, as if they had a nest there or young. Bodies about the size of a robin; short tail; wings and tail white-edged; bill about one and a half inches long, orange beneath in one bird; brown, deepening into black spots above; turtle-dove color on breasts and beneath; ashy about eyes and cheeks. Seemed not willing to fly, and for a long time unwilling to pass me, because it must come near to keep under the button-bushes. An old man who used to frequent Walden fifty- five years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with ducks and other game. He went there to fish and used an old log canoe, made of two white pine logs dug out and pinned together and pitched, which he found on the shore. It was very clumsy but durable and belonged to the pond. He did not know whom it belonged to; it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his anchor of hickory bark tied together. An old man, a potter, who lived in these woods before the Revolution, told him that there was an iron chest at the bottom of the pond, and he had seen it. It would sometimes come floating up toward the shore, and, when you went toward it, go back into deep water and disappear.’ P. M. — To Baker Farm by boat. The yellowish or greenish orchis out, maybe a day or two. It would be a very warm afternoon, if there were not so good a breeze from the southwest. The Ranunculus Purshii begins to show now in large fields in shallow water, both on shore and in middle, the river having gone down lately. The Ranunculus fih- formis is out a day or two, delayed by the height of the water. Comarum palustre, some time; vide twenty or thirty rods above the Hubbard Bridge; an interest- ing leaf. Was that a smaller bittern or a meadow-hen that we started from out the button-bushes? What places for the mud-hen beneath the wild stems of the button- bushes along the shore, all shaggy with rootlets, as if all the weeds the river produced — all the ranun- culus at least — had drifted and lodged against them. Their stems are so nearly horizontal near the mud and water that you can clamber along on them over the water many rods.’ It is one of the wildest features in our scenery. There is scarcely any firm footing on the ground except where a muskrat has made a heap of clamshells. Picture the river at a low stage of the water, the pads shrivelled in the sun hanging from the dark-brown stems of the button-bush, which are all shaggy with masses of dark rootlets, an impenetrable thicket, and a stake-driver, or Ardea minor, sluggishly winging his way up the stream. The breams’ nests, like large deep milk-pans, are left high and dry on the shore. They are not only deep- ened within, but have raised edges. In some places, as at the boat place at the Baker Farm, they are as close together as they can stick, with each a great bream in it, whose waving fins and tail are tipped with a sort of phosphorescent luminousness. Saw in the meadow there a more than double side- saddle-flower, — a monster, though not in size. The exterior calyx was of five or six small greenish leaves of different sizes, and others smaller were continued irregularly nearly two inches down the stem. The in- terior calyx consisted of, not one only, but four, rows of narrower leaves than usual. Petals were none, now at least, it being late, and the stigma, instead of being one, broad and flat, was of half a dozen erectish crimped green leaves. I should have mentioned the rich salmon- brown (is it?), sort of iron-rust color, of the fields of potamogeton, now that the river is low, with its spikes of flowers just rising above the water and the large, semitransparent radical leaves now floating on the surface, here and there. What a rapid and luxuriant growth of weeds along the shore! overtopped by that tall rank grass I mentioned yesterday, now in flower (? )." The polygonums are reddish. We sailed all the way back from the Baker Farm, though the wind blew very nearly at right angles with the river much of the way. By sitting on one side of the boat we made its edge serve for a keel, so that she would mind her helm. ‘The dog swam for long distances behind us. Each time we passed under the lee of a wood we were becalmed and then met with contrary and flawy winds till we got fairly beyond its influ- ence. But you can always sail either up or down the river, for the wind inclines to blow with the stream, especially where the banks are high. We taste at each cool spring with which we are acquainted in the bank, making haste to reach it before the dog, who otherwise is sure to be found cooling himself in it. We some- times use him on board to sit in the stern and trim the boat while we both row, for he is heavy, and other- wise we sink the bows too much in the water. But he has a habit of standing too near the rower, and each time receiving a fillip under the chin from the rower’s fists. So at last he tumbles himself overboard and takes a riparial excursion. And we are amused to see how judiciously he selects his points for crossing the river from time to time, in order to avoid long cir- cuits made by bays and meadows and keep as near us as possible. At Bittern Cliff, on the south side, the little earth on the rocks is already parched and the shrubs are withering with drought. The spring is long since past there. Found there the Potentilla arguta, — crowded cinquefoil, — well out, our only white cinquefoil; stem and leaves somewhat like the Norvegica, but more woolly, a yellowish white. According to Bigelow, rare. Also there a Galium trifidum var. tinctorium (? ). I see some red maple leaves with the points of the three principal lobes covered with that crimson frost- ing which I saw some time since on the black birch.

Friday. Another breezy night and no fog this morning. The pogonias, adder’s-tongue arethusas, I see nowadays, getting to be numerous, are far too pale to compete with the A. bulbosa, and then their snake-like odor is much against them. Fresh mackerel for some days past. Here have been three ultra-reformers, lecturers on Slavery, Temperance, the Church, etc., in and about our house and Mrs. Brooks’s the last three or four days,—A. D. Foss, once a Baptist minister in Hopkinton, N. H.; Loring Moody, a sort of travel- ling pattern-working chaplain; and H. C. Wright, who shocks all the old women with his infidel writings. Though Foss was a stranger to the others, you would have thought them old and familiar cronies. (They happened here together by accident.) They addressed each other constantly by their Christian names, and rubbed you continually with the greasy cheeks of their kindness. They would not keep their distance, but cuddle up and lie spoon-fashion with you, no mat- ter how hot the weather nor how narrow the bed,! — chiefly? I was awfully pestered with his benig- nity; feared I should get greased all over with it past restoration; tried to keep some starch in my clothes. He wrote a book called “A Kiss for a Blow,” and he behaved as if there were no alternative between these, or as if I had given him a blow. I would have preferred the blow, but he was bent on giving me the kiss, when there was neither quarrel nor agreement between us. I wanted that he should straighten his back, smooth out those ogling wrinkles of benignity about his eyes, and, with a healthy reserve, pronounce something in a downright manner. It was difficult to keep clear of his slimy benignity, with which he ‘ sought to cover you before he swallowed you and took you fairly into his bowels.* It would have been far worse than the fate of Jonah. I do not wish to get any nearer to a man’s bowels than usual. They lick you as a cow her calf. They would fain wrap you about with their bowels. addressed me as “ Henry” within one minute from the time I first laid eyes on him, and when I spoke, he said with drawling, sultry sympathy, “Henry, I know all you would say; I under- stand you perfectly; you need not explain anything to me;”’* and to another, “I am going to dive into Henry’s inmost depths.” I said, “I trust you will not strike your head against the bottom.” He could tell in a dark room, with his eyes blinded and in perfect stillness, if there was one there whom he loved. One of the most attractive things about the flowers is their beautiful reserve. The truly beautiful and noble puts its lover, as it were, at an infinite distance, while it attracts him more strongly than ever. I do not like the men who come so near me with their bowels. It is the most disagreeable kind of snare to be caught in. Men’s bowels are far more slimy than their brains. They must be ascetics indeed who approach you by this side. What a relief to have heard the ring of one healthy reserved tone! With such a forgiving disposi- tion, as if he were all the while forgiving you for ex- isting. Considering our condition or habit of soul, — maybe corpulent and asthmatic, — maybe dying of atrophy, with all our bones sticking out, — is it kind- ness to embrace a man? ‘They lay their sweaty hand on your shoulder, or your knee, to magnetize you.

Saturday. 4 a. M. — By boat to Nawshaw- tuct; to Azalea Spring, or Pinxter Spring. No fog and very little dew, or perhaps it was a slight rain in the night. I find always some dew in low ground. There is a broad crescent of clear sky in the west, but it looks rainy in the east. As yet we are disappointed of rain. Almost all birds appear to join the early morn- ing chorus before sunrise on the roost, the matin hymn. I hear now the robin, the chip-bird, the blackbird, the martin, etc., etc., but I see none flying, or, at last, only one wing in the air, not yet illustrated by the sun. As I was going up the hill, I was surprised to see rising above the June-grass, near a walnut, a whitish object, like a stone with a white top, or a skunk erect, for it was black below. It was an enormous toadstool, or fungus, a sharply conical parasol in the form of a sugar loaf, slightly turned up at the edges, which were rent half an inch in every inch or two. The whole height was sixteen inches. The pileus or cap was six inches long by seven in width at the rim, though it appeared longer than wide. There was no veil, and the stem was about one inch in diameter and naked. The top of the cap was quite white within and without, hoariest at top of the cone like a mountain-top, not smooth but with [a] stringy kind of scales turned up- ward at the edge, which declined downward, 2. e. down the cap, into a coarse hoariness, as if the com- pact white fibres had been burst by the spreading of the gills and showed the black. As you looked up within, the light was transmitted between the trembling gills. It looked much like an old felt hat [that] is pushed up into a cone and its rim all ragged and with some meal shaken on to it; in fact, it was almost big enough for a child’s head. It was so delicate and fragile that its whole cap trembled on the least touch, and, as I could not Jay it down without injuring it, I was obliged to carry it home all the way in my hand and erect, while I paddled my boat with one hand. It was a wonder how its soft cone ever broke through the earth. Such growths ally our age to former periods, such as geo- logy reveals. I wondered if it had not some relation to the skunk, though not in odor, yet in its colors and the general impression it made. It suggests a vegeta- tive force which may almost make man tremble for his dominion. It carries me back to the era of the forma- tion of the coal-measures — the age of the saurus and pleiosaurus and when bullfrogs were as big as bulls. Its stem had something massy about it like an oak, large in proportion to the weight it had to support (though not perhaps to the size of the cap), like the vast hollow columns under some piazzas, whose caps have hardly weight enough to hold their tops together. It made you think of parasols of Chinese mandarins; or it might have been used by the great fossil bullfrog in his walks. What part does it play in the economy of the world? I see the curled fragments of some larger turtle’s egg-shells on the high bank of the North River, near a cavity, proportionally large, in the black earth, where was once a coal pit. Was it not a mud turtle? They are more dusky-spotted. The panicled andromeda. The mullein yesterday. It bears inspection; is a rich yellow flower with dark-orange anthers, opening now in rings of five or six large flowers one inch in diame- ter around the spike, the next row of buds above just showing yellowish through downy floral leaves, like the saffron dawn through twilight clouds. I have just been out (7.30 a. M.) to show my fungus. The milkman and the butcher followed me to inquire what it was, and children and young ladies addressed me in the street who never spoke to me before. It is so fragile I was obliged to walk at a funereal pace for fear of jarring it. It is so delicately balanced on its stem that it falls to one side across it on the least in- clination; falls about like an umbrella that has lost its stays. It is rapidly curling up on the edge, and the rents increasing, until it is completely fringed, and is an inch wider there. It is melting in the sun and light, and black drops and streams falling on my hand and fragments of the black fringed rim falling on the sidewalk. Evidently such a plant can only be seen in perfection in the early morning. It is a creature of the night, like the great moths. They wish me to send it to the first of a series of exhibitions of flowers and fruits to be held at the court-house this afternoon, which I promise to do if it is presentable then. Per- haps it might be placed in the court-house cellar and the company be invited at last to walk down and examine it. Think of placing this giant parasol fungus in the midst of all their roses; yet they admit that it would overshadow and eclipse them all. It is to be remarked that this grew, not in low and damp soil, but high up on the open side of a dry hill, about two rods from a walnut and one from a wall, in the midst of and rising above the thin June-grass. The last night was warm; the earth was very dry, and there was a slight sprinkling of rain. I believe the 14th was the first day I began to wear my single thin sack in my walk and at night sleep with both windows open; say, when the swamp-pink opens. ‘The locust is done, and its shrivelled dirty- white petals cover the ground between the blades of grass like a crusting or sugaring of snow. Meadow- rue, with a rank, offensive smell like a strong-smell- ing dog. The floating-heart in river like a minute white lily, now at 5 a. M. Swamp blackberry probably now. I think the blossom of the sweet-briar, now in prime, —eglantine, —is more delicate and interesting than that of the common roses, though smaller and paler and without their spicy fragrance; but its fragrance is in its leaves all summer, and the form of the bush is handsomer, curving over from a considerable height in wreaths sprinkled with numerous flowers. They open out flat soon after sunrise. Flowers whitish in middle, then pinkish-rose inclining to purple toward the edges.

P. M. — To Flint’s Pond. I see large patches of blue-eyed grass in the meadow across the river from my window. ‘The pine woods at Thrush Alley emit that hot dry scent, reminding me even of days when I used to go a-blackberrying. The air is full of the hum of invisible insects, and I hear a locust. Perhaps this sound indicates the time to put on a thin coat. But the wood thrush sings as usual far in the wood. A blue jay and a tanager come dashing into the pine under which I stand. The first flies directly away, screaming with suspicion or dis- gust, but the latter, more innocent, remains. ‘The cuckoo is heard, too, in the depths of the wood. Heard my night-warbler on a solitary white pine in the Heywood Clearing by the Peak. Discovered it at last, looking like a small piece of black bark curving partly over the limb. ¥ No fork to its tail. It appeared black beneath ; was very shy, not bigger than a yellowbird, and very slender. In the middle of the path to Wharf Rock at Flint’s Pond, the nest of a Wilson’s thrush, five or six inches high, between the green stems of three or four golden- rods, made of dried grass or fibres of bark, with dry oak leaves attached loosely, making the whole nine or ten inches wide, to deceive the eye. Two blue eggs. Like an accidental heap. Who taught it to do thus? Lobelia Dortmanna, a day or two at most. No grass balls yet. That fine-rooted green plant on bottom sends up stems with black heads three or four inches. Do they become white? Every one who has waded about the shores of a pond must have been surprised to find how much warmer the water was close to the shore, where only three or four inches deep, than a little fur- ther out. I think I saw a young crow now fully grown. Returned by Smith’s Hill and the Saw Mill Brook. Got quite a parcel of strawberries on the hill. The hellebore leaves by the brook are already half turned yel- low. Plucked one blue early blueberry. The strain of the bobolink now begins to sound a little rare. It never again fills the air as the first week after its arrival. At this season we apprehend no long storm, only showers with or without thunder.