15 October 1855 – 21 October 1855

P. M.— Go to look for white pine cones, but see none. Saw a striped squirrel on a rail fence with some kind of weed in his mouth. Was it milkweed seed? At length he scud swiftly along the middle rail past me, and, instead of running over or around the posts, he glided through the little hole in the post left above the rails, as swiftly as if there had been no post in the way. Thus he sped through five posts in succession in a straight line, incredibly quick, only stooping and straightening himself at the holes. The hornets’ nests are exposed, the maples being bare, but the hornets are gone. I see one a very per- fect cone, like a pitch pine cone, uninjured by the birds, about twelve feet from the ground, by a swamp, three feet from the end of a maple twig and upheld by it alone passing through its top, about an inch deep, seven and a half inches wide, by eight long. A few sere maple leaves adorn and partly conceal the crown, at the ends of slight twigs which are buried in it. What a wholesome color! somewhat like the maple bark (and so again concealed) laid on in successive layers in arcs of circles a tenth of an inch wide, eye- brow-wise, gray or even white or brown of various shades, with a few dried maple leaves sticking out the top of it.

P. M.— To the white pine grove beyond Beck Stow’s. What has got all the cones? How evenly the freshly fallen pine-needles are spread on the’ ground! quite like a carpet. Throughout this grove no square foot is left bare. I dug down with a stick and found that the layers of three or four years could be distinguished with considerable ease, and much deeper the old needles were raised in flakes or layers still. The topmost, or this year’s, were fawn-colored; last year’s, dark dull reddish; and so they went on, growing darker and more decayed, till, at the depth of three inches, where, perhaps, the needles were fifteen or twenty years old, they began to have the aspect of a dark loose-lying virgin mould, mixed with roots (pine cones and sticks a little higher). The freshly fallen needles lay as evenly strewn as if sifted over the whole surface; giving it a uniform neat fawn-color, tempting one to stretch himself on it. They rested alike on the few green leaves of weeds and the fallen cones and the cobwebs between them, in every direction across one another like joggle-sticks. In course of years they are beaten by rain and snow into a coarse, thick matting or felt to cover the roots of the trees with. I look at a grass-bird on a wall in the dry Great Fields. ‘There is a dirty-white or cream-colored line above the eye and another from the angle of the mouth beneath it and a white ring close about the eye. The breast is streaked with this creamy white and dark brown in streams, as on the cover of a book.

P. M. — Up river. A fine Indian-summer afternoon. There is much gossamer on the button-bushes, now bare of leaves, and on the sere meadow-grass, looking toward the sun, in countless parallel lines, like the ropes which connect the masts of a vessel. I see the roots of the great yellow lily lying on the mud where they have made a ditch in John Hosmer’s meadow for the sake of the mud, gray-colored when old and dry. Some are three and a half inches in di- ameter, with their great eyes or protuberant shoulders where the leaf-stalks stood in quincunx order around them. What rank vigor they suggest! like serpents winding amid the mud of the meadow. You see where the ditcher’s spade has cut them into masses about as thick as long. What are those clusters of cuplike cavities between the eyes, some nearly a quarter of an inch in diameter, with a pistil-like prominence within ? I saw behind (or rather in front of) me as I rowed home a little dipper appear in mid-river, as if I had passed right over him. It dived while I looked, and I could not see it come up anywhere.

Last night I was reading Howitt’s account of the Australian gold-diggings, and had in my mind’s eye the numerous valleys with their streams all cut up with foul pits, ten to a hundred feet deep and half a dozen feet across, as close as they can be dug. and half full of water, where men furiously rushed to probe for their fortunes, uncertain where they shall break ground, not knowing but the gold is under their camp itself; sometimes digging a hundred and sixty feet before they strike the vein, or then missing it by a foot; turned into demons and regardless of each other’s rights in their thirst after riches; whole valleys for thirty miles suddenly honeycombed by the pits of the miners, so that hundreds are drowned in them. Standing in water and covered with mud and clay, they work night and day, dying of exposure and dis- ease. Having read this and partly forgotten it, I was thinking of my own unsatisfactory life, doing as others do without any fixed star habitually in my eye, my foot not planted on any blessed isle. Then, with that vision of the diggings before me, I asked myself why I might not be washing some gold daily, though it were only the finest particles, or might not sink a shaft down to the gold within me and work that mine. There ~ is a Ballarat or Bendigo for you. What though it were a “Sulky Gully”? Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence. Wherever a man separates from the mul- titude and goes his own way, there is a fork in the road, though the travellers along the highway see only a gap in the paling.’ P. M. — To Great Meadows to observe the hum- mocks left by the ice. They are digging the pond at the new cemetery. I go by Peter’s path. How charming a footpath! Nthil humanum, etc. I was delighted to find a new footpath crossing this toward Garfield’s. The broad and dusty roads do not’ remind me of man so much as of cattle and horses. There are a great many crows scat- tered about on the meadow. What do they get to eat there? Also I scare up a dozen larks at once. A large brown marsh hawk comes beating the bush along the river, and ere long a slate-colored one (male), with black tips, 1s seen circling against a distant wood-side. I scare up in midst of the meadows a great many dark- colored sparrows, one or two at a time, which go off with a note somewhat like the lesser redpoll’s, —some migrating kind, I think.? There is a hummock in the lower part of the mea- dows near the river every two or three rods, where they appeared as thick last year, sometimes consisting of that coarse meadow-grass or sedge but quite as often Vide pages forward. * Probably what I think must be shore larks in fall of ’58. of the common meadow sod. Very often it has lodged on one of those yellowish circles of the sedge, it being higher. Last winter’s hummocks are not much flat- tened down yet. I am inclined to think that the coarse sedgy hummocks do not fall so round at first, but are wont to grow or spread in that wise when a fragment has been dropped. Perhaps the sedge is oftenest lifted because it 1s so coarse. There is no life perceptible on this broad meadow except what I have named. The crows are very con- spicuous, black against the green. The maple swamps, bare of leaves, here and there about the meadow, look like smoke blown along the edge of the woods. Some distinct maples, wholly stripped, look very whole- some and neat, nay even ethereal. To-day my shoes are whitened with the gossamer which I noticed yesterday on the meadow-grass. I find the white fragments of a tortoise-shell in the meadow, — thirty or forty pieces, straight-sided poly- gons, — which apparently a hay-cart passed over. They look like broken crockery. I brought it home and amused myself with putting it together. It is a painted tortoise. The variously formed sections or component parts of the shell are not broken, but only separated. 'To restore them to their places is like the game which children play with pieces of wood com- pleting a picture. It is surprising to observe how these different parts are knitted together by countless minute teeth on their edges. Then the scales, which are not nearly so numerous, and therefore larger commonly, are so placed over the former as to break joints always, as appears by the indented lines at their edges and the serrations of the shell. These scales, too, slightly overlap each other, 2. e. the foremost over the next behind, so that they may not be rubbed off. Thus the whole case is bound together like a very stout band- box. The bared shell is really a very interesting study. The sternum in its natural position looks like a well- contrived drag, turned up at the sides in one solid piece. Noticed a single wreath of a blood-red blackberry vine on a yellow sand slope, very conspicuous by contrast. When I was surveying for Legross, as we went to our work in the morning, we passed by the Dudley family tomb, and Legross remarked to me, all in good faith, “Would n’t you like to see old Daddy Dudley ? He lies in there. I'll get the keys if you ’d like. I some- times go in and look at him.” The upper shell of this tortoise is formed of curved rafters or ribs, which are flatted out to half an inch or five eighths in width, but the rib form appears in an elevated ridge along the middle and in a spine at the lower end, fitting firmly into a deep hole in an edge bone, and also a projection (or process?) to meet the spinal column at the upper end. Some of these plates (? ) I fitted together far more closely and wonderfully, con- sidering the innumerable sharp serrations, than any child’s wooden sections of a picture. Yet it is impos- sible to put the whole together again, so perfectly do the plates interlock and dovetail into each other at different angles, and they could only have grown to- gether and shrunk apart. It is an admirable system of breaking joints, both in the arrangement of the parts of the shell and in that of the scales which overlap the serrations of the former. ‘The sternum consists of nine parts, there being an extra trigonal or pentagonal piece under the head or throat. The two middle pieces on each side curve upward to meet the edge bones, without any serration or joint at the lower edge of the sternum there; nor is there any joint in the scales there. In the upper shell there ap- pear to be eight or nine small dorsal pieces, about six- teen rib pieces, and about twenty-two edge or mar- ginal pieces; but of the parts of the upper shell I am not quite certain. The sternums of the box turtles and the stinkpot are much flatter, 7. e. not so much curved up at the sides, and are nearer to the upper shell. The painted tortoise has the flattest back; the Czstudo Carolina, the highest and fullest (with a ridge); the stinkpot, the sharpest. The C. Blandingu is very regularly arched. The Emys insculpta is of moderate elevation (with a ridge). Those bright-red marks on the marginal scales of the painted tortoise remind me of some Chinese or other Oriental lacquer-work on waiters (?). This color fades to a pale yellow. The color is wholly in the scale above the bone. Of the bright colors, the yellow marks on tortoise-shells are the fastest. How much beauty in decay! I pick up a white oak leaf, dry and stiff, but yet mingled red and green, October-like, whose pulpy part some insect has eaten beneath, exposing the delicate network of its veins. It is very beautiful held up to the light, — such work as only an insect eye could perform. Yet, perchance, to the vegetable kingdom such a revelation of ribs is as repulsive as the skeleton in the animal kingdom. In each case it is some little gourmand, working for another end, that reveals the wonders of nature. There are countless oak leaves in this condition now, and also with a submarginal line of network exposed. Men rush to California and Australia as if the true gold were to be found in that direction; but that is to go to the very opposite extreme to where it lies. They go prospecting further and further away from the true lead, and are most unfortunate when most successful. Is not our native soil auriferous? Does not a stream from the golden mountains flow through our native valley? and has it not for more than geo- logic ages been bringing down the shining particles and the nuggets? Yet, strange to tell, if a digger steal away prospecting for this true gold into the un- explored solitudes, there is no danger, alas, that any will dog his steps and endeavor to supplant him. He may claim and undermine the whole valley, even the cultivated and uninhabited portions, his whole life long in peace, and no one will ever dispute his claim. They will not mind his cradles or his toms. He is not confined to a claim twelve feet square, as at Ballarat, but — may mine anywhere, and wash the whole wide world in his tom.’ To rebuild the tortoise-shell is a far finer game than any geographical or other puzzle, for the pieces ‘ [Cape Cod, and Miscellanies, p. 466; Misc., Riv. 267, 268.] Vide pages forward. do not merely make part of a plane surface, but you have got to build a roof and a floor and the connect- ing walls. ‘These are not only thus dovetailed and braced and knitted and bound together, but also held together by the skin and muscles within. Itis a band-box.

P. M. — To Pine Hill for chestnuts. It is a very pleasant afternoon, quite still and cloud- less, with a thick haze concealing the distant hills. Does not this haze mark the Indian summer? I see Mrs. Riordan and her little boy coming out of the woods with their bundles of fagots on their backs. It is surprising what great bundles of wood an Irish- woman will contrive to carry. I confess that though I could carry one I should hardly think of making such a bundle of them. They are first regularly tied up, and then carried on the back by a rope, — somewhat like the Indian women and their straps. There is a strange similarity; and the little boy carries his bundle proportionally large. The sticks about four feet long. They make haste to deposit their loads before I see them, for they do not know how pleasant a sight it is to me. The Irishwoman does the squaw’s part in many respects. Riordan also buys the old railroad sleepers at three dollars a hundred, but they are much decayed and full of sand. Therien tells me, when I ask if he has seen or heard any large birds lately, that he heard a cock crow this morning, a wild one, in the woods. It seems a dozen fowls (chickens) were lost out of the cars here a fort- night ago. Poland has caught some, and they have one at the shanty, but this cock, at least, is still abroad and can’t be caught. If they could survive the winter, I suppose we should have had wild hens before now. Sat and talked with Therien at the pond, by the rail- road. He says that James Baker told the story of the perch leaping into a man’s throat, etc., of his father or uncle (Amos ?). The woods about the pond are now a perfect Octo- ber picture; yet there have been no very bright tints this fall. The young white and the shrub oak leaves were withered before the frosts came, perhaps by the late drought after the wet spring. Walking in E.’s path west of the pond, I am struck by the conspicuous wreaths of waxwork leaves about the young trees, to the height of twelve or fifteen feet. These broad and handsome leaves are still freshly green, though drooping or hanging now closely about the vine, but contrast remarkably with the bare trunks and the changed leaves above and around. I hear many crickets by this path and see many warily standing on the quiz vive in awkward positions, or running their heads under a chip, or prying into a hole, but I can see none creaking. I see at last a few white pine cones open on the trees, but almost all ap- pear to have fallen. The chestnuts are scarce and small and apparently have but just begun to open their burs. That globular head of pale-yellow spheres of seed- parachutes along the wood road is the rough hawk- weed. The single heads of savory-leaved aster are of the same color now. When, returning at 5 o’clock, I pass the pond in the road, I see the sun, which is about entering the grosser hazy atmosphere above the western horizon, brilliantly reflected in the pond, —a dazzling sheen, a bright golden shimmer. His broad sphere extended stretches the whole length of the pond toward me. First, in the extreme distance, I see a few sparkles of the gold on the dark surface; then begins a - regular and solid column of shimmering { gold, straight as a rule, but at one place, where a breeze strikes the surface from one side, it is remarkably spread or widened, then recovers its straightness again, thus: Again it is remarkably curved, say thus: | 4 then broken into several pieces, then straight and entire again, then spread or blown aside at the point like smoke from a chimney, b thus: Of course, if there were eyes enough to oc- cupy all the east shore, the whole pond 4 would be seen as one dazzling shim- mering lake of melted gold. Such beauty and splendor adorns our walks! I measured the depth of the needles under the pitch pines east of the railroad (behind the old shanties), which, as I remember, are about thirty years old. In one place it is three quarters of an inch in all to the soil, in another one and a quarter, and in a hollow under a larger pine about four inches. I think the thickness of the needles, old and new, is not more than one inch there on an average. These pines are only four or five inches thick. See slate-colored snowbirds. Talking with Bellew this evening about Fourierism and communities, I said that I suspected any enter- prise in which two were engaged together. “But,” said he, “it is difficult to make a stick stand unless you slant two or more against it.”” “Oh, no,”’ answered I, ‘you may split its lower end into three, or drive it single into the ground, which is the best way; but most men, when they start on a new enterprise, not only figuratively, but really, pull up stakes. When the sticks prop one another, none, or only one, stands erect.” He showed me a sketch of Wachusett. Spoke of his life in Paris, etc. I asked him if he had ever visited the Alps and sketched there. He said he had not. Had he been to the White Mountains? “No,” he an- swered, “the highest mountains I have ever seen were the Himalayas, though I was only two years old then.” It seems that he was born in that neighborhood. He complains that the Americans have attained to bad luxuries, but have no comforts. Howitt says of the man who found the great nugget which weighed twenty-eight pounds at the Bendigo diggings in Australia: “He soon began to drink; got a horse, and rode all about, generally at full gallop, and when he met people, called out to inquire if they knew who he was, and then kindly informed them that he was ‘the bloody wretch that had found the nugget.’ - At last he rode full speed against a tree, and nearly knocked his brains out. He is a hopelessly ruined man.” In my opinion there was no danger, for he had already knocked his brains out against the nugget. But he is a type of the class. They are all fast men. Hear some of the names of the places where they dig: “Jackass Flat,” — “Sheep’s-Head Gully,” — “Sulky Gully,’ — *Murderer’s Bar,” etc.

P. M. — To Nawshawtuct. Agreeable to me is the scent of the withered and de- caying leaves and pads, pontederias, on each side as I paddle up the river this still cloudy day, with the faint twittering or chirping of a sparrow still amid the bare button-bushes. It is the scent of the year, passing away like a decaying fungus, but leaving a rich mould, I trust. On the 18th I found the Great Meadows wet, yet Beck Stow’s was remarkably dry. Last summer the case was reversed. I find, here and there on the hill, apples, sometimes three or four, carried to the mouth of a striped squir- rel’s hole, four or five rods from the tree, with the marks of his teeth in them, by which he carried them, and the chankings or else fragments of the skin of others there. There is no heap of sand to betray these little holes, but they descend perpendicularly in the midst of a clean sod. I was at first admiring the beauty of the wild apples, — now is the time, — some freckled with blood-red spots and perhaps also touched with a greenish rust here and there, like a fine lichen or fungus.’ @ I see on the dead top of a hickory, twittering very much like swallows, eighteen and more bluebirds, per- haps preparing to migrate. I have collected and split up now quite a pile of drift- wood, — rails and niders and stems and stumps of trees, — perhaps half or three quarters of a tree. It is more amusing, not only to collect this with my boat and bring [it] up from the river on my back, but to split it also, than it would be to speak to a farmer for a load of wood and to saw and split that. Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am han- dling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while itis burning in the winter evening. ‘That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it. When I am splitting it, I study the effects of water on it, and, if it is a stump, the curiously winding grain by which it separates into so many prongs, — how to take advantage of its grain and split it most easily. I find that a dry oak stump will split pretty easily in the direction of its diameter, but not at right angles with it or along its circles of growth. I got out some good knees for a boat. Thus one half the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy. Some of my acquaintances have been wondering why I took all this pains, bringing some nearly three miles by water, and have suggested various reasons for it. I tell them in my despair of making them under- stand me that it is a profound secret, — which it has proved, — yet I did hint to them that one reason was that I wanted to get it. I take some satisfaction in eating my food, as well as in being nourished by it. I feel well at dinner-time as well as after it. The world will never find out why you don’t love to have your bed tucked up for you, — why you will be so perverse. I enjoy more drinking water at a clear spring than out of a goblet at a gentleman’s table. I like best the bread which I have baked, the garment which I have made, the shelter which I have constructed, the fuel which I have gathered. It is always a recommendation to me to know that a man has ever been poor, has been regularly born into this world, knows the language. I require to be assured of certain philosophers that they have once been barefooted, footsore, have eaten a crust because they had nothing better, and know what sweetness resides in it. I have met with some barren accomplished gentle- men who seemed to have been to school all their lives and never had a vacation to live in. Oh, if they could only have been stolen by the Gypsies! and carried far beyond the reach of their guardians! They had better have died in infancy and been buried under the leaves, their lips besmeared with blackberries, and Cock Robin for their sexton.

It began to rain about 10 o’clock last evening after a cloudy day, and it still rains, gently but steadily, this morning. The wind must be east, for I hear the church bell very plainly; yet I sit with an open window, it is so warm. Looking into the yard, I see the currant bushes all bare of leaves, as they have been some time; but the gooseberries at the end of their row are covered with reddened leaves. This gradualness in the chang- ing and falling of the leaves produces agreeable effects and contrasts. The currant row is bare, but the goose- berries at the end are full of scarlet leaves still. I have never liked to have many rich fruits ripening at the same season. When Porter apples, for instance, are ripe, there are also other early apples and pears and plums and melons, ete. Nature by her bounte- ousness thus disgusts us with a sense of repletion — and uncleanness even. Perhaps any one of these fruits would answer as well as all together. She offers us too many good things at once. | I enjoyed getting that large oak stump from Fair Haven some time ago, and bringing it home in my boat. I tipped it in with the prongs up, and they spread far over the sides of the boat. ‘There was no passing amid- ships. I much enjoyed this easy carriage of it, float- ing down the Musketaquid from far. It was a great stump and sunk my boat considerably, and its prongs were so in the way that I could take but a short stroke with my paddle. I enjoyed every stroke of my paddle, every rod of my progress, which advanced me so easily nearer to my port. It was as good as to sit by the best oak wood fire. I still enjoy such a conveyance, such a victory, as much as boys do riding on a rail. All the upper part of this, when I came to split it, I found to be very finely honeycombed, reduced to a coarse cellular mass, apparently by shrinkage and wasting; but it made excellent fuel, nevertheless, as if all the combustible part remained. Only the earthy had returned to earth. When Allen was here the other day, I found that I could not take two steps with him. He taught school in Concord seventeen [?] years ago, and has not been here since. He wished much to see the town again, but nothing living and fair in it. He had, I should say, a very musty recollection of it. He called on no living creature among all his pupils, but insisted on going [to] the new burying-ground and reading all the epitaphs. I waited at the gate, telling him that that ground did not smell good. I remembered when the first body was placed in it. He did, however, ask after one or two juvenile scamps and one idiotic boy who came to school to him, — how they had turned out, — and also after a certain caged fool, dead since he was here, who had lived near where he boarded; also after a certain ancient tav- ern, now pulled down. This at odd intervals, for he improved all the rest of his time while he was here in attending a Sabbath-school convention. I have been thinking over with Father the old houses in this street. There was the Hubbard (?) house at the fork of the roads; the Thayer house (now Gar- rison’s); Sam Jones’s (now Channing’s); Willoughby Prescott’s (a bevel-roof, which I do not remember), where Loring’s is (Hoar’s was built by a Prescott); Ma’m Bond’s; the Jones Tavern (Bigelow’s); the old Hurd (or Cumming’s?) house; the Dr. Hurd house; the old mill; and the Richardson Tavern (which I do not remember). On this side, the Monroe house, in which we lived; the Parkman house, which William Heywood told me twenty years ago that he helped raise the rear of sixty years before (it then sloping to one story behind), and that then it was called an old house (Dr. Ripley said that a Bond built it); the Mer- rick house; a rough-cast house where Bates’s is (Betty ?); and all the south side of the Mill-Dam. Still further from the centre the old houses and sites are about as numerous as above. Most of these houses slanted to one story behind. P. M. — Up Assabet. A damp cloudy day only, after all, and scarcely any rain; a good day for all hunters to be out, especially on the water. The yellowish leaves of the black oak incline soon to a decayed and brown look. The red oak is more red. But the scarlet is very bright and conspicuous. How finely its leaves are cut against the sky with sharp points, especially near the top of the tree! They look somewhat like double or treble crosses.1 The squirrels appear to have stripped this tree entirely, and I find the fragments of nutshells beneath it. They have also eaten the white and red and black oak acorns very generally, but there are more of the last left. Further up, on the big red maple in Wheeler’s Swamp, I see two gray squirrels chasing each other round and round the trunk of the tree, now close to each other, now far apart, one stealing off behind a limb, and now resting on opposite sides of the trunk,— where they might not be noticed, being of the same color with the bark, — indifferently with their heads down or up. Then away goes one out on a twig, and leaps into the next tree, and the other swiftly follows, and sometimes, when the twig is slight or chiefly leaves they leap into, they have to make a swinging somerset of it, to save them- selves while they cling to it. At length they separate to feed, and I see them running up to the very tops of the swamp white oaks and out to the extremities of the boughs, and jump- ing at the extreme twig which bears acorns, which they cut off, and devour, sitting on a firmer limb. It is surprising how rapidly they devour one after another, dropping the cups and scales and bits of the meat. It is surprising also to observe, when one wishes to reach a certain part of a neighboring tree, how surely he runs back to the trunk and then selects the right ‘limb by which to reach it, without any hesitation, as if he knew the road. You see, around the muskrat-houses, a clear space, where they have cut off the pontederias of which they are built; and now, after last night’s rain, the river is risen some, and the pontederia roots, etc., which have been eaten by them, are washed up together next the shore. That apparently shell-less snail or slug which is so common this damp day under apple trees, eating the apples, is evidently one of the naked Mollusca, the Division Gasteropoda, a Evmax, perhaps the Limax tunicata of Gould. He describes but one other spe- cles. Almost all wild apples are handsome. Some are knurly and peppered all over or on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a yellowish-white ground; others have crimson blotches or eyes, more or less confluent and fiery when wet, — for apples, like shells and pebbles, are handsomest in a wet day. Taken from under the tree on the damp sward, they shrivel and fade. Some have these spots beneath a reddened surface with obscure rays. Others have hundreds of fine blood-red rays, running regularly, though broken, from the stem dimple to the blossom, like meridian lines, on a straw-colored ground, — perfect spheres. Others are a deep, dark red, with very obscure yet darker rays; others a uniform clear, bright red, ap- proaching to scarlet.!