20 April 1857 – 26 April 1857

Arbor-vite apparently in full bloom.

Tuesday. Mr. Loomis writes me that he saw two barn swallows in Cambridge April Ist! I have the Corema Conradi from Plymouth, in bloom. It snows hard all day. If it did not melt so fast, would be a foot deep. As it is, is about three inches on a level.

Wednesday. Fair again. To Great Sudbury Meadow by boat. The river higher than before and rising. C. and I sail rapidly before a strong northerly wind, — no need of rowing upward, only of steering, — cutting off great bends by crossing the meadows. We have to roll our boat over the road at the stone bridge, Hubbard’s cause- way, (to save the wind), and at Pole Brook (to save distance). It is worth the while to hear the surging of the waves and their gurgling under the stern, and to feel the great billows toss us, with their foaming yellowish crests. The world is not aware what an ex- tensive navigation is now possible on our overflowed fresh meadows. It is more interesting and fuller of life than the sea bays and permanent ponds. A dozen gulls are circling over Fair Haven Pond, some very white beneath, with very long, narrow-pointed, black- tipped wings, almost regular semicircles like the new moon. As they circle beneath a white scud in this bright air, they are almost invisible against it, they are so nearly the same color. What glorious fliers! But few birds are seen; only a crow or two teetering along the water’s edge looking for its food, with its large, clumsy head, and on unusually long legs, as if stretched, or its pants pulled up to keep it from the wet, and now flapping off with some large morsel in its bill; or robins in the same place; or perhaps the sweet song of the tree sparrows from the alders by the shore, or of a song sparrow or blackbird. ‘The phcoebe is scarcely heard. Not a duck do we see! All the shores have the aspect of winter, covered several inches deep with snow, and we see the shadows on the snow as in winter; but it is strange to see the green grass burning up through in warmer nooks under the walls. We pause or lay to from time to time, in some warm, smooth lee, under the southwest side of a wood or hill, as at Hubbard’s Second Grove and opposite Weir Hill, pushing through saturated snow like ice on the surface of the water. There we lie awhile amid the bare alders, maples, and willows, in the sun, see the expanded sweet- gale and early willows and the budding swamp pyrus looking up drowned from beneath. As we lie in a broad field of meadow wrack, — floating cranberry leaves and finely bruised meadow-hay, —a wild medley. Count- less spiders are hastening over the water. We pass a dozen boats sunk at their moorings, at least at one end, being moored too low. Near Tall’s Island, rescued a little pale or yellowish brown snake that was coiled round a willow half a dozen rods from the shore and was apparently chilled by the cold. Was it not Storer’s “little brown snake?” It had a flat body. Frank Smith lives in a shanty on the hill near by. At the Cliff Brook I see the skunk-cabbage leaves not yet unrolled, with their points gnawed off. Some very fresh brown fungi on an alder, tender and just formed one above another, flat side up, while those on the birch are white and flat side down. They soon dry white and hard. This melting snow makes a great crop of fungi. Turritis stricta, nearly out (in two or three days). Observed the peculiar dark lines on a birch (Betula populifolia) at the insertion of the branches, regular cones like volcanoes in outline, the part included grayish-brown and wrinkled, edged by broad heavy dark lines. There are as many of these very regular cones on the white ground of a large birch as there are branches. They are occasioned by the two currents of growth, that of the main trunk and that of the branch (which last com- menced several inches lower near the centre of the tree), oe “Me = ~ - 2 "e owe meeting and being rucked or turned up at the line of contact like a surge, exposing the edges of the inner bark there, decayed and dark, while the bark within the lines approaches the darker color of the limb. The larger were six or seven inches high by as much in width at the bottom. You observe the same manner of growth in other trees. That portion of the bark below the limb obeys the influence of the limb and endeavors to circle about it, but soon encounters the growth of the main stem. There are interesting figures on the stem of a large white birch, arranged spirally about it. The river has risen several inches since morning, so that we push over Hubbard Bridge causeway, where we stuck in the morning.

I saw at Ricketson’s a young woman, Miss Kate Brady, twenty years old, her father an Imish- man, a worthless fellow, her mother a smart Yankee. The daughter formerly did sewing, but now keeps school for a livelihood. She was born at the Brady house, I think in Freetown, where she lived till twelve years old and helped her father in the field. There she rode horse to plow and was knocked off the horse by apple tree boughs, kept sheep, caught fish, etc., etc. I never heard a girl or woman express so strong a love for nature. She purposes to return to that lonely ruin, and dwell there alone, since her mother and sister will not accompany her; says that she knows all about farming and keeping sheep and spinning and weaving, though it would puzzle her to shingle the old house. There she thinks she can “live free.” I was pleased to hear of her plans, because they were quite cheerful and origi- nal, not professedly reformatory, but growing out of her love for “ Squire’s Brook and the Middleborough ponds.” A strong love for outward nature is singularly rare among both men and women. The scenery immediately about her homestead is quite ordinary, yet she appreciates and can use that part of the universe as no other being can. Her own sex, so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea, but she has a strong head and a love for good reading, which may carry her through. I would by no means discourage, nor yet particularly encourage her, for I would have her so strong as to succeed in spite of all ordinary discouragements. It is very rare that I hear one express a strong and imperishable attachment to a particular scenery, or to the whole of nature, —I mean such as will control their whole lives and characters. Such seem to have a true home in nature, a hearth in the fields and woods, whatever tenement may be burned. The soil and climate is warm to them. They alone are naturalized, but most are tender and callow creatures that wear a house as their outmost shell and must get their lives insured when they step abroad from it. They are lathed and plastered in from all natural influences, and their deli- cate lives are a long battle with the dyspepsia. The others are fairly rooted in the soil, and are the noblest plant it bears, more hardy and natural than sorrel. The dead earth seems animated at the prospect of their coming, as if proud to be trodden on by them. It re- cognizes its lord. Children of the Golden Age. Hos- pitals and almshouses are not their destiny. When I hear of such an attachment in a reasonable, a divine, creature to a particular portion of the earth, it seems as if then first the earth sueeeeded and rejoiced, as if it had been made and existed only for such a use. These various soils and reaches which the farmer plods over, which the traveller glances at and the geologist dryly describes, then first flower and bear their fruit. Does he chiefly own the land who coldly uses it and gets corn and potatoes out of it, or he who loves it and gets in- spiration from it? How rarely a man’s love for nature becomes a ruling principle with him, like a youth’s affection for a maiden, but more enduring! All nature is my bride. That nature which to one is a stark and ghastly solitude is a sweet, tender, and genial society to another. They told me at New Bedford that one of their whalers came in the other day with a black man aboard whom they had picked up swimming in the broad Atlantic, without anything to support him, but nobody could understand his language or tell where he came from. He was in good condition and well-behaved. My re- spect for my race rose several degrees when I heard this, and I thought they had found the true merman at last. “What became of him?” I inquired. “T believe they sent him to the State Almshouse,”’ was the reply. Could anything have been more ridiculous? That he should be beholden to Massachusetts for his support who floated free where Massachusetts with her State Almshouse could not have supported herself for a moment. They should have dined him, then accompa- nied him to the nearest cape and bidden him good-by. The State would do well to appoint an intelligent standing committee on such curious [sic], in behalf of philologists, naturalists, and so forth, to see that the proper disposition is made of such visitors.

Sail to Ball’s Hill. The water is at its height, higher than before this year. I see a few shad-flies on its surface. Scudding over the Great Meadows, I see the now red crescents of the red maples in their prime round about, above the gray stems. The willow osiers require to be seen endwise the rows, to get an intense color. The clouds are handsome this afternoon: on the north, some dark, windy clouds, with rain falling thus beneath : — Tia y but itis chiefly wind; southward, those summer clouds in numerous isles, light above and dark-barred beneath. Now the sun comes out and shines on the pine hill west of Ball’s Hill, lighting up the light-green pitch pines and the sand and russet-brown lichen-clad hill. That is a very New England landscape. Buttrick’s yellow farmhouse near by is in harmony with it. The little fuzzy gnats are about. I see a vertical circular cobweb, more than a foot in diameter, nearly filled with them, and this revealed the existence of the swarms that had filled the air on all sides. If it had been as “~ .° ofa e many yards wide as it was inches, it would probably have been just as full. Saw on a small oak slanting over water in a swamp, in the midst of a mass of cat-briar, about ten feet from the ground, a very large nest, of that hypnum (?) moss, in the form of an inverted cone, one foot across above and about eight inches deep, with a hole in the side very thick and warm; probably a mouse-nest, for there were mouse droppings within.

Saturday. P. M.— Down Turnpike to Smith’s Hill and return by Goose Pond. Saw a large old hollow log with the upper side [gone], which [made] me doubt if it was not a trough open at the ends, and suggested that the first trough was per- haps such a hollow log with one side split off and the ends closed. It is cool and windy this afternoon. Some sleet falls, but as we sit on the east side of Smith’s chestnut grove, the wood, though so open and leafless, makes a perfect lee for us, apparently by breaking the force of the wind. A dense but bare grove of slender chest- nut trunks a dozen rods wide is a perfect protection against this violent wind, and makes a perfectly calm lee.

Riordan’s cock follows close after me while spading in the garden, and hens commonly follow the gardener and plowman, just as cowbirds the cattle in a pasture. I turn up now in the garden those large leather- colored nymphs. P. M. — Up Assabet to White Cedar Swamp. See on the water over the meadow, north of the boat’s place, twenty rods from the nearest shore and twice as much from the opposite shore, a very large striped snake swimming. It swims with great ease, and lifts its head a foot above the water, darting its tongue at us. A snake thus met with on the water appears far more monstrous, not to say awful and venomous, than on the land. It is always something startling and memorable to meet with a serpent in the midst of a broad water, careering over it. But why had this one taken to the water? Is it possible that snakes ever hibernate in meadows which are subject to be overflown? This one when we approached swam toward the boat, ap- parently to rest on it, and when I put out my paddle, “at once coiled itself partly around it and allowed itself to be taken on board. It did not hang down from the paddle like a dead snake, but stiffened and curved its body in a loose coil about it. This snake was two feet and eleven inches long; the tail alone, seven and a quarter. There [were] one hun- dred and forty-five large abdominal plates, besides the three smaller under the head, and sixty-five pairs of caudal scales. ‘The central stripe on the back was not bright-yellow, as Storer describes, but a pale brown or clay-color; only the more indistinct lateral stripes were a greenish yellow, the broad dark-brown stripes being between; beneath greenish. Beneath the tail in centre, a dark, somewhat greenish line. This snake was killed about 2 Pp. M.; 2. e., the head was perfectly killed then; yet the posterior half of the body was apparently quite alive and would curl strongly around the hand at 7 p. m. It had been hanging ona tree in the meanwhile. I have the same objection to killing a snake that I have to the killing of any other animal, yet the most humane man that I know never omits to kill one. I see a great many beetles, etc., floating and struggling on the flood. | We sit on the shore at Wheeler’s fence, opposite Merriam’s. At this season still we go seeking the sun- niest, most sheltered, and warmest place. C. says this is the warmest place he has been in this year. We are in this like snakes that lie out on banks. In sunny and sheltered nooks we are in our best estate. There our thoughts flow and we flourish most. By and by we shall seek the shadiest and coolest place. How well adapted we are to our climate! In the winter we sit by fires in the house; in spring and fall, in sunny and sheltered nooks; in the summer, in shady and cool groves, or over water where the breeze circulates. Thus the average tempera- ture of the year just suits us. Generally, whether in sum- mer or winter, we are not sensible either of heat or cold. A great part of our troubles are literally domestic or originate in the house and from living indoors. I could write an essay to be entitled “ Out of Doors,” —under- take a crusade against houses. What a different thing Christianity preached to the house-bred and to a party who lived out of doors! Also a sermon is needed on eco- nomy of fuel. What nght has my neighbor to burn ten cords of wood, when I burn only one? Thus robbing our half-naked town of this precious covering. Is he so much colder than I? It is expensive to maintain him in our midst. If some earn the salt of their porridge, are we certain that they earn the fuel of their kitchen and parlor? One man makes a little of the driftwood of the river or of the dead and refuse (unmarketable!) [wood] of the forest suffice, and Nature rejoices in him. Another, Herod-like, requires ten cords of the best of young white oak or hickory, and he is commonly es- teemed a virtuous man. He who burns the most wood on his hearth is the least warmed by the sight of it grow- ing. Leave the trim wood-lots to widows and orphan girls. Let men tread gently through nature. Let us religiously burn stumps and worship in groves, while Christian vandals lay waste the forest temples to build miles of meeting-houses and horse-sheds and feed their box stoves. The white cedar is apparently just out. The higher up the tree, the earlier. ‘Towed home an oak log some eighteen feet long and more than a foot through, with a birch withe around it and another birch fastened to that. Father says he saw a boy with a snapping turtle yesterday.