24 November 1856 – 30 November 1856

Tuesday. Get home again this morn- ing.

P. M.— Take a turn down the river. A painted tortoise sinking to the bottom, and appar- ently tree sparrows along the shore.

P.M.—'To chestnut wood by Turnpike, to see if I could find my comb, probably lost out of my pocket when I climbed and shook a chestnut tree more than a month ago. Unexpectedly find many chestnuts in the burs which have fallen some time ago. Many are spoiled, but the rest, being thus moistened, are softer and sweeter than a month ago, very agreeable to my palate. The burs from some cause having fallen without dropping their nuts. As I stood looking down the hill over Emerson’s young wood-lot there, perhaps at 3.30 p. M., the sun- hght reflected from the many ascending twigs of bare young chestnuts and birches, very dense and ascendant with a marked parallelism, they reminded me of the lines of gossamer at this season, being almost exactly similar to the eye. It is a true November phenomenon.

Begins to snow this morning and snows slowly and interruptedly with a little fine hail all day till it is several inches deep. This the first snow I have seen, but they say the ground was whitened for a short time some weeks ago. It has been a remarkably pleasant November, warmer and pleasanter than last year.

Sunday. P.M.—To Cliffs via Hubbard’s Grove. Several inches of snow, but a rather soft and mild air still. Now see the empty chalices of the blue-curls and the rich brown-fruited pinweed above the crust. (The very cat was full of spirits this morning, rushing about and frisking on the snow-crust, which bore her alone. When I came home from New Jersey the other day, was struck with the sudden growth and stateli- ness of our cat Min, —his cheeks puffed out like a regular grimalkin. I suspect it is a new coat of fur against the winter chiefly. The cat is a third bigger than a month ago, like a patriarch wrapped in furs; and a mouse a day, I hear, is nothing to him now.) This as I go through the Depot Field, where the stub ends of corn-stalks rise above the snow. I find half a dozen russets, touched and discolored within by frost, still hanging on Wheeler’s tree by the wall. I see the fine, thin, yellowish stipule of the pine leaves now, on the snow by Hubbard’s Grove and where some creature has eaten the resinous terminal pitch pine buds.’ In Hubbard’s bank wall field, beyond the brook, see the tracks of many sparrows that have run from weed to weed, as if a chain had dropped there. Not an apple is left in the orchard on Fair Haven Hill; not a track there of walker. Now all plants are with- ered and blanched, except perhaps some Vacciniwm vacillans red leaves which sprang up in the burning last spring. Here and there a squirrel or a rabbit has hastily crossed the path. Minott told me on Friday of an oldish man and woman who had brought to a muster here once a great leg of bacon boiled, to turn a penny with. The skin, as thick as sole-leather, was flayed and turned back, displaying the tempting flesh. A tall, raw-boned, omnivorous heron of a Yankee came along and bar- gained with the woman, who was awaiting a customer, for as much of that as he could eat. He ate and ate and ate, making a surprising hole, greatly to the amuse- ment of the lookers-on, till the woman in her despair, unfaithful to her engagement, appealed to the police to drive him off. Sophia, describing the first slight whitening of snow a few weeks ago, said that when she awoke she noticed a certain bluish-white reflection on the wall and, looking out, saw the ground whitened with snow. My first sight of snow this year I got as I was sur- veying about the 5th of November in a great wooded gully making up from the Raritan River, in Perth Amboy, N. J. It was a few fine flakes in the chilly air, which very few who were out noticed at all. That country was remarkable for its gullies, com- monly well wooded, with a stream at the bottom. One was called Souman’s [?] Gully, the only good name for any feature of the landscape thereabouts, yet the inhabitants objected especially to this word “ gully.” That is a great place for oysters, and the inhabitants of Amboy are said to be very generally well off in con- sequence. All are allowed to gather oysters on the flats at low tide, and at such times I saw thirty or forty wading about with baskets and picking them up, the indigenous ones. Off the mouth of the Raritan, I saw about seventy-five boats one morning busily taking up the oysters which they had laid down, — their usual morning’s work. I used to get my clothes covered with beggar-ticks in the fields there, and burs, small and large. Minot Pratt tells me that he watched the fringed gentian this year, and it lasted till the first week in November.