29 August 1859 – 4 September 1859

I hear in the street this morning a goldfinch sing part of a sweet strain.

P.M.— Up Assabet.

P. M. — To Fair Haven Hill. Was caught in five successive showers, and took refuge in Hayden’s barn, under the cliffs, and under a tree. A thunder-cloud, seen from a hilltop, as it is ad- vancing rapidly across the sky on one side, whose rear at least will soon strike us. The dark-blue mass (seen edgewise) with its lighter upper surface and its copious curving rain beneath and behind, like an immense steamer holding its steady way to its port, with tremen- dous mutterings from time to time, a rush of cooler air, and hurried flight of birds. These later weeds, — chenopodiums, Roman worm- wood, amaranth, etc., — now so rank and prevalent in the cultivated fields which were long since deserted by the hoers, now that the potatoes are for the most part ripened, are preparing a crop for the small birds of the fall and winter, those pensioners on civilization. These weeds require cultivated ground, and Nature perse- veres each year till she succeeds in producing a bounti- ful harvest by their seeds, in spite of our early assiduity. Now that the potatoes are cared for, Nature is prepar- ing a crop of chenopodium and Roman wormwood for the birds. Now especially the crickets are seen and heard on dry and sandy banks and fields, near their burrows, and some hanging, back down, to the stems of grass, feeding. I entered a dry grassy hollow where the cricket alone seemed to reign, — open like a bowl to the sky. While I stand under a pine for shelter during the rain, on Fair Haven Hill-side, I see many sarsaparilla plants fallen and withering green, 2. e. before changing. It 1s as if they had a weak hold on the earth, on the subter- ranean stocks. The nightshade berries are handsome, not only for their clear red, but the beautifully regular form of their drooping clusters, suggesting a hexagonal arrangement for economy of room. There was another shower in the night (at 9 Pp. M.), making the sixth after 1.30 p.m. It was evidently one cloud thus broken into six parts, with some broad in- tervals of clear sky and fair weather. It would have been convenient for us, if it had been printed on the first cloud, “Five more to come!”’ Such a shower has a history which has never been written. One would like to know how and where the cloud first gathered, what lands and water it passed over and watered, and where and when it ceased to rain and was finally dissipated.

P.M.— To Saw Mill Brook and Flint’s Pond. That reach in the road this side Britton’s Camp might be called Nabalus Road, they are so abundant there. Some of them are fully six feet high, —a sin- gularly tall and slender plant. See, I think, my first tobacco-pipe this afternoon, now that they are about done, and have seen no pine- sap this year, abundant as both the above were last year. Like fungi, these plants are apparently scarce in a dry year, so that you might at first think them rare plants. This is a phenomenon of drought. I see in different places small grubs splitting leaves now, and so marking them curiously with light brown or whitish on the green. Here are two at work in a Rhus Toxicodendron \eaf. ‘They appear to have been hatched within the leaf at the apex, and each has eaten upward on its own side of the midrib and equally fast, making a light-colored figure shaped like a column of smoke in the midst of the green. They perfectly split the leaf, making no visible puncture in it, even.at the ribs or veins. Some creatures are so minute that they find food enough for them between the two sides of a thin leaf, without injuring the cuticle. The ox requires =~. the meadows to be shorn for him, and cronches both blade and stalk, even of the coarsest grass, as corn; but ~ these grubs do their browsing in narrower pastures, pastures not so wide as their own jaws, between fences (inviolable to them) of their own establishing, or along narrow lanes. ‘There, secure from birds, they mine, and no harm can they do now that the green leaf has so commonly done its office. If you would study the birds now, go where their food is, 2. e. the berries, especially to the wild black cher- ries, elder-berries, poke berries, mountain-ash berries, and ere long the barberries, and for pigeons the acorns. In the sprout-land behind Britton’s Camp, I came to a small black cherry full of fruit, and then, for the first time for a long while, I see and hear cherry-birds — their shrill and fine seringo — and the note of robins, which of late are scarce. We sit near the tree and listen to the now unusual sounds of these birds, and from time to time one or two come dashing from out the sky toward this tree, till, seeing us, they whirl, disappointed, and perhaps alight on some neighboring twigs and wait till we are gone. The cherry-birds and robins seem to know the locality of every wild cherry in the town. You are as sure to find them on them now, as bees and butterflies on the thistles. If we stay long, they go off with a fling, to some other cherry tree, which they know of but we do not. The neighborhood of a wild cherry full of fruit is now, for the notes of birds, a little spring come back again, and when, a mile or two from this, I was plucking a basketful of elder-bermes (for which it was rather early yet), there too, to my surprise, I came on a flock of golden robins and of bluebirds, apparently feeding on them. Excepting the vacciniums, now past prime and drying up, the cherries and elder- berries are the two prevailing fruits now. We had remarked on the general scarcity and silence of the birds, but when we came to the localities of these fruits, there again we found the berry-eating birds assembled, — young (?) orioles and bluebirds at the elder-berries. Green white pine cones are thrown down. An un- usual quantity of these have been stripped for some time past, and I see the ground about the bases of the trees strewn with them. The spikenard berries in the shade at Saw Mill have but just begun to turn. The Polygonatum biflorum with its row of bluish-green berries (the blue a bloom), pendulous from the axils of the recurved stem, appar- ently now in its prime. Red choke-berry ripe. Smooth sumach probably hardly ripe yet generally. The fruit of the arum is the most remarkable that I see this afternoon, such its brilliancy, color, and form; perhaps in prime now. It is among the most easily detected now on the floor of the swamp, its bright- scarlet cone above the fallen and withered leaves and amid its own brown or whitish and withering leaves. Its own leaves and stem perhaps soft and decaying, while it is perfectly fresh and dazzling. It has the brightest gloss of any fruit I remember, and this makes the green ones about as remarkable as the scarlet. With, perchance, a part of the withered spathe still investing and veiling it. The scarlet fruit of the arum spots the swamp floor. Now, also, bright-colored fungi of various colors on the swamp floor begin to compete with these fruits. I see a green one. | The elder-berry cyme, held erect, is of very regular form, four principal divisions drooping toward each quarter around an upright central one. Are said to make a good dye. They fill your basket quickly, the cymes are so large and lie up so light. The autumnal dandelion is a prevailing flower now, but since it shuts up in the afternoon it might not be known as common unless you were out in the morning or in a dark afternoon. Now, at 11 A. M., it makes quite a show, yet at 2p. m. I do not notice it. Bought a pair of shoes the other day, and, observing that as usual they were only wooden-pegged at the toes, I required the seller to put in an extra row of iron pegs there while I waited for them. So he called to his boy to bring those zinc pegs, but I insisted on iron pegs and no zinc ones. He gave me considerable advice on the subject of shoes, but I suggested that even the wearer of shoes, of whom I was one, had an opportunity to learn some of their qualities. I have learned to respect my own opinion in this matter. As I do not use blacking and the seller often throws in a box of blacking when I buy a pair of shoes, they accumulate on my hands. Saw this afternoon, on a leaf in the Saw Mill wood- path, a very brilliant beetle a quarter or a third of an inch in length with brilliant green and copper re- flections.* The same surface, or any part of the upper surface, of the bug was green from one point of view and burnished copper from another. Yet there was nothing in its form to recommend this bug. You must be careful not to eat too many nuts. I one winter met a young man whose face was broken out into large pimples and sores, and when I inquired what was the matter, he answered that he and his wife were fond of shagbarks, and therefore he had bought a bushel of them, and they spent their winter evenings eating them, and this was the consequence.

P.M.— To Ledum Swamp. The pontederia leaves are now decidedly brown or brownish, and this may be the effect of frost, since we have had some considerable in low places. Perhaps they occupy particularly cold places. The farmer is obliged to hide his melon-patch in the midst of his corn or potatoes, far away. I sometimes stumble on it as I am going across lots. I see one to- day where the watermelons are intermixed with carrots in a carrot-bed, and so concealed by the general resem- blance of leaf, etc., at a little distance. Going along Clamshell Hill, [ look over the meadows. Now, after the first rain raising the river, the first assault on the summer’s sluggishness, the air is of late cooler and clearer, autumnal, and the meadows and low grounds, which, of course, have been shorn, acquire a fresh yellowish green as in the spring. This is another phase of the second spring, of which the peeping of hylas by and by is another.’ cyperuses — which are yellow and low and late — being revealed by cutting the grass and still growing. I once did some surveying for a man who remarked, but not till the job was done, that he did not know when he should pay me. I did not pay much heed to this, though it was unusual, supposing that he meant to pay me some time or other. But after a while he sent to me a quart of red huckleberries, and this I thought was ominous and he distinguished me altogether too much by this gift, since I was not his particular friend. I saw it was the first installment, which would go a great way toward being the last. In course of years he paid a part of the debt in money, and that is the last I have heard of it. The sarothra grows thickly, and is now abundantly in bloom, on denuded places, 7. e., where the sod and more or less soil has been removed, by sandy roadsides. At Ledum Swamp the frosts have now touched the Polygonum Carey pretty extensively, the leaves and stem, leaving the red spikes; also some erechthites and poke and the tenderest high blueberry shoots, their tips (from where the bushes were cut down). But the Woodwardia Virginica is not touched. (Vide back, August 23d.) Poke berries begin at Corner Spring.

A strong wind, which blows down much fruit. R. W. E. sits surrounded by choice windfall pears.

P. M. — To Well Meadow and Walden. The purple culms and spikes of the crab-grass or finger-grass, spreading and often almost prostrate under our feet in sandy paths and causeways, are where the purple cuticle of the earth again shows itself, and we seem to be treading in our vintage whether we will or not. Earth has donned the purple. When, walking over some dry field (some time since), I looked down and saw the yellowish tuft of the F'imbristylis capillaris, with its spreading inverted cone of capillary culms, like the upper half of an hour-glass, but still more, when, pacing over the sandy railroad causeway, I look down and find myself treading on the purple culms of the crab-grass, I am reminded of the maturity of the year. We have now experienced the full effects of heat such as we have in this latitude. The earth itself appears to me as a ripe purple fruit, — though somewhat dusty here, — and I may have rubbed the bloom off with my feet. But if Bacchus can ever stand our climate, this must be his season. Topping the corn, which has been going on some days, now reveals the yellow and yellowing pumpkins. This is a genuine New England scene. The earth blazes not only with sun-flowers but with sun-fruits. The four-leaved loosestrife, which is pretty generally withering and withered, seems to have dried up, — to suffer peculiarly from the annual drought, — perhaps both on account of its tenuity and the sandiness or dry- ness of its locality. The Lycopodium complanatum sheds pollen [sic]. Where are the robins and red-wing blackbirds of late ? I see no flocks of them; not one of the latter, and only a few solitary robins about wild cherry trees, etc. A few yew berries, but they appear (?) to be drying ™ up. The most wax-like and artificial and surprising of our wild berries, — as surprising as to find currants on hemlocks. In the Well Meadow Swamp, many apparent Aster miser, yet never inclining to red there (in the leaf) and sometimes with larger flowers (five eighths of an inch [in] diameter) and slenderer cauline leaves than common, out apparently almost as long as miser elsewhere. The swamp thistle (Cirstwm muticum) is apparently in its prime. One or two on each has faded, but many more are to come. Some are six feet high and have radical leaves nearly two feet long. Even these in the shade have humblebees on them. You see small flocks of ducks, probably wood ducks, in the smaller woodland ponds now and for a week, as I at Andromeda Ponds, and can get nearer to them than in the spring. The Cornus sericea and C’. paniculata are rather pe-. culiar for turning to a dull purple on the advent of cooler weather and frosts, in the latter part of August and first part of September. The latter, which grows at the bottom of our frostiest hollows, turns a particu- larly clear dark purple, an effect plainly attributable to frost. I see it this afternoon in the dry, deep hollow just west of the middle Andromeda Pond. I think I see two kinds of three-ribbed goldenrod (be- side Canadensis), both being commonly smooth-stemmed below and downy above, but one has very fine or small rays as compared with the other. They appear to be both equally common now. The fine-rayed at Sedge Path. : Cae, ‘See a very large mass ae”. = Ss-¥ of spikenard berries fairly rea ae ripening, eighteen inches long. Three kinds of thistles are commonly out now, — the pasture, lanceolate, and swamp, — and on them all you are pretty sure to see one or two humblebees. They be- come more prominent and interesting in the scarcity of purple flowers. (On many you see also the splendid goldfinch, yellow and black (?) like the humble- bee.) The thistles beloved of humblebees and gold- finches. Three or four plants are peculiar now for bearing plentifully their fruit in drooping cymes, viz. the elder- berry and the silky cornel and the Viburnum Lentago and Solanum Dulcamara. 'The other cornels do not generally come to droop before they lose their fruit. Nor do the ~ viburnums droop much. The fruit of the Cornus seri- cea is particularly interesting to me, and not too pro- fuse, — small cymes of various tints half concealed amid the leaves.