30 July 1855 – 5 August 1855

Saw the lightning on the telegraph battery and heard the shock about sundown from our window; —an intensely bright white light.

Our dog-days seem to be turned to a rainy season. Mr. Derby, whose points of compass I go to regulate, tells me that he remembers when it rained for three weeks in haying time every day but Sundays. Rode to J. Farmer’s. He says that on a piece of an old road on his land, discontinued forty years ago, for a distance of forty rods which he plowed, [he found] two or three dollars in small change. Among the rest he showed me an old silver piece about as big as a ten- cent-piece, with the word skilli, etc., etc., on it, appar- ently a Danish shilling? His boy has a republican swallow’s egg, long and much spotted; a dove’s egg. Found a bay-wing’s nest and got an egg; three half hatched, with dark spots, not lines; low in grass; of stubble, lined with root- fibres and then horsehair; in a dry field of his. He gave me what he called the seringo’s egg. (He calls it chick- le-see.)* Pointed out the bird to me. Says that she enters to her nest by a long gallery, sometimes two or three feet long, under the grass, and the nest is very hard to find. Gave me a small pure white egg. The boy thought it a small pewee’s (?). Farmer showed me that every wilted or diseased pigweed had green lice on its root. He says he some- times finds the marsh wren’s nest in meadows, hung to the grass, and hole on one side. Hears it almost every night near the brook beyond Dr. Bartlett’s. Has found lark’s nest covered over. Found lately on his sand two arrowheads, and, close by, a rib and a shoulder-blade and kneepan (?), he thinks of an Indian. His son Edward gave me a blue jay’s egg as well as the seringo’s above named, also another, rounder and broader egg found in that open field without any nest, maybe the same kind, somewhat singularly marked, but whiter at one end and browner at the other.

P. M.— To Conantum by boat. Squirrels have eaten and stripped pitch pine cones. Small rough sunflower a day or two. Diplopappus cornifolius (how long?) at Conant Orchard Grove. In the spring there, which has not been cleared out lately, I find a hairworm, eight or nine inches long and big as a pin-wire; is biggest in the middle and tapers thence to tail; at head is abruptly cut off; curly in your fingers like the tendril of a vine. I spent half an hour overhauling the heaps of clamshells under the rocks there. Was surprised to find the anodon and the green-rayed clams there. Pennyroyal and alpine enchanter’s-nightshade well out, how long? Young Adams of Waltham tells me he has been moose-hunting at Chesuncook. Hunted with a guide in evening without horn, it being too early to call them out. Heard the water dropping from their muzzles when they lifted their heads from feeding on the pads, as they stood in the river.

4 A. M. — On river to see swallows. They are all gone; yet Fay saw them there last night after we passed. Probably they started very early. I asked Minott if he ever saw swallows migrating, not telling him what I had seen, and he said that [he] used to get up and go out to mow very early in the morning on his meadow, as early as he could see to strike, and once, at that hour, hearing a noise, he looked up and could just distinguish high overhead fifty thou- sand swallows. He thought it was in the latter part of August. What I saw is like what White says of the swallows, in the autumn, roosting “every night in the osier beds of the aits” of the river Thames; and his editor, Jesse, says, “Swallows in countless numbers still assemble every autumn on the willows growing on the aits of the river Thames.”’ And Jardine, in his notes to Wil- son, says that a clergyman of Rotherham describes in an anonymous pamphlet their assembling (in the words of the pamphlet) “at the willow ground, on the banks of the canal, preparatory to their migration,”