26 September 1859 – 2 October 1859

P. M. — To Clamshell by boat. The Solanum dulcamara berries are another kind which grows in drooping clusters. I do not know any clusters more graceful and beautiful than these droop- ing cymes of scarlet or translucent cherry-colored ellip- tical berries with steel-blue (or lead?) purple pedicels (not peduncles) like those leaves on the tips of the branches. ‘These in the water at the bend of the river are peculiarly handsome, they are so long an oval or ellipse. No berries, methinks, are so well spaced and agreeably arranged in their drooping cymes, — some- what hexagonally like a honeycomb. Then what a variety of color! The peduncle and its branches are green, the pedicels and sepals only that rare steel-blue purple, and the berries a clear translucent cherry red. They hang more gracefully over the river’s brim than any pendants in a lady’s ear. The cymes are of irregu- lar yet regular form, not too crowded, elegantly spaced. Yet they are considered poisonous! Not to look at, surely. Is it not a reproach that so much that is beauti- ful is poisonous to us? Not in a stiff, flat cyme, but in different stages above and around, finding ample room in space. But why should they not be poisonous? Would it not be in bad taste to eat these berries which are ready to feed another sense? A drooping berry should always be of an oval or pear shape. Nature not only produces good wares, but puts them up hand- somely. Witness these pretty-colored and variously shaped skins in which her harvests, the seeds of her various plants, are now being packed away. I know in what bags she puts her nightshade seeds, her cranber- ries, viburnums, cornels, by their form and color, often by their fragrance; and thus a legion of consumers find them. The celtis berries are still green. The pontederia is fast shedding its seeds of late. I saw a parcel suddenly rise to the surface of their own accord, leaving the axis nearly bare. Many are long since bare. They float, at present, but probably sink at last. There are a great many floating amid the pads and in the wreck washed up, of these singular green spidery(? )-looking seeds. Probably they are the food of returning water-fowl. They are ripe, like the seeds of different lilies, at the time the fowl return from the north. I hear a frog or two, either palustris or halecina, croak and work faintly, as in spring, along the side of the river. So it is with flowers, birds, and frogs a renewal of spring. Hearing a sharp phe-phe and again phe-phe-phe, I look round and see two (probably larger) yellow-legs, like pigeons, standing in the water by the bare, flat ammannia shore, their whole forms reflected in the water. They allow me to paddle past them, though on the alert. Heavy Haynes says he has seen one or two fish hawks within a day or two. Also that a boy caught a very large snapping turtle on the meadow a day or two ago. He once dug one up two or three feet deep in the meadow in winter when digging mud. He was rather dormant. Says he remembers a fish-house that stood by the river at Clamshell. Observed the spiders at work at the head of Willow Bay. Their fine lines are extended from one flag or bur- reed to another, even six or eight feet, perfectly parallel with the surface of the water and only a few inches above it. I see some,—though it requires a very favor- able light to detect them, they are so fine, — blowing off perfectly straight horizontally over the water, only half a dozen inches above it, as much as seven feet, one end fastened to,a reed, the other free. They look as stiff as spears, yet the free end waves back and forth horizontally in the air several feet. They work thus in calm and fine weather when the water is smooth. Yet they can run over the surface of the water readily. The savage in man is never quite eradicated. I have just read of a family in Vermont who, several of its members having died of consumption, just burned the lungs, heart, and liver of the last deceased, in order to prevent any more from having it. How feeble women, or rather ladies, are! They can- not bear to be shined on, but generally carry a parasol to keep off the sun.

At Cattle-Show to-day I noticed that the ladies’ apple (small, one side green, the other red, glossy) and maiden’s-blush (good size, yellowish-white with a pink blush) were among the handsomest. The pumpkin-sweet one of the largest exhibited. The ram’s- horn was a handsome uniformly very dark purple or crimson. The white pine seed is very abundant this year, and this must attract more pigeons. Coombs tells me that he finds the seed in their crops. Also that he found with- in a day or two a full-formed egg with shell in one. In proportion as a man has a poor ear for music, or loses his ear for it, he is obliged to go far for it or fetch it from far, and pay a great price for such as he can hear. Operas, ballet-singers, and the like only affect him. It is like the difference between a young and healthy appetite and the appetite of an epicure, between a sweet crust and a mock-turtle soup. As the lion is said to lie in a thicket or in tall reeds and grass by day, slumbering, and sallies at night, just so with the cat. She will ensconce herself for the day in the grass or weeds in some out-of-the-way nook near the house, and arouse herself toward night.

Down railroad and to Fair Haven Hill. In Potter’s maple swamp I see the (apparently) Aspidium Thelypteris (revolute segments) about half decaying or whitish, but later than the flowering fern and the osmunda, which are almost entirely withered and brown there. Dogwood (poison) berries are ripe, and leaves begun to fall. Juniperus repens berries are quite green yet. I see some of last year’s dark-purple ones at the base of the branchlets. There is a very large specimen on the side of Fair Haven Hill, above Cardinal Shore. This is very handsome this bright afternoon, especially if you stand on the lower and sunny side, on account of the various ways in which its surging flakes and leafets, green or silvery, reflect the light. It is as if we were giants, and looked down on an evergreen forest from whose flaky surface the light is variously reflected. Though so low, it is so dense and rigid that neither men nor cows think of wading through it. We get a bird’s-eye view of this evergreen forest, as a hawk sailing over, looking into its unapproachable clefts and recesses, reflecting a green or else a cheerful silvery light. Horse-chestnuts strew the roadside, very handsome- colored but simply formed nuts, looking like mahogany knobs, with the waved and curled grain of knots. Having just dug my potatoes in the garden, — which did not turn out very well, — I took a basket and trowel and went forth to dig my wild potatoes, or ground-nuts, by the railroad fence. I dug up the tubers of some half a dozen plants and found an unexpected yield. One string weighed a little more than three quarters of a pound. There were thirteen which I should have put with the large potatoes (this year) if they had been the common kind. The biggest was two and three quarters inches long and seven inches in circumference the smallest way. Five would have been called good-sized potatoes. It is but a slender vine now, killed by frost, and not promising such a yield, but deep in the soil (or sand), five or six inches or sometimes a foot, you come to the string of brown and commonly /nubby nuts. The cuticle of the tuber is more or less cracked longitudinally, forming meridional furrows, and the roots (? ), or shoots, bear a large proportion to the tuber. In case of a famine I should soon resort to these roots. If they increased in size, on being cultivated, as much as the common po- tato has, they would become monstrous.’ Saw a warbler in Potter’s Swamp, light-slate head and above and no bars on wings; yellow all beneath, except throat, which was lighter ash, and perhaps upper part of breast; a distinct light ring about eye, iris-like; light bill, and apparently flesh-color legs, ete. Very * inquisitive, hopping within ten feet, with a chip. It is somewhat like the Nashville warbler.”

P. M. — Up Assabet. Ever since the unusually early and severe frost of the 16th, the evergreen ferns have been growing more and more distinct amid the fading and decaying and wither- ing ones, and the sight of those suggests a cooler season. They are greener than ever, by contrast. The terminal shield fern is one of the handsomest. The most de- cidedly evergreen are the last, polypody, Aspidvum mar- ginale, and Aspidium spinulosum of Woodis Swamp and Brister’s. Asplenium Filix-femina (?) is decay- ing, maybe a little later than the dicksonia, — the largish fern with long, narrow pinnules deeply cut and toothed, and reniform fruit-dots. Of the twenty-three ferns which I seem to know here, - seven may be called evergreens. As far as I know, the . earliest to wither and fall are the brake (mostly fallen), | the Osmunda cinnamomea (begun to be stripped of leaves), O. Claytoniana, and O. regalis (the above four generally a long time withered, or say since the 20th); also (5th), as soon, the exposed onoclea; then (6th) the dicksonia, (7th) Aspidiwm Noveboracense, (8th) Thelyp- teris, (9th) Filix-femina (the last four now fully half faded or decayed or withered). Those not seen are Adiantum pedatum, Woodwardia Virginica, Asplenvum thelypteroides, Woodsia Ilvensis, Aspidium cristatum, Lygodium palmatum, Botrychium Virginicum. Some acorns (swamp white oak) are browned on the trees, and some bass berries. Most shrub oak acorns browned.

P. M. — To the beeches. Looking down from Pine Hill, I see a fish hawk over Walden. The shrub oaks on this hill are now at their height, both with respect to their tints and their fruit. The plateaus and little hollows are crowded with them three to five feet high, the pretty fruit, varying in size, pointed- ness, and downiness, being now generally turned brown, with light, converging meridional lines. Many leading shoots are perfectly bare of leaves, the effect of the frost, and on some bushes half the cups are empty, but these cups generally bear the marks of squirrels’ teeth, and probably but few acorns have fallen of themselves yet. However, they are just ready to fall, and if you bend back the peduncles on these bare and frost-touched shoots, you find them just ready to come off, separating at the base of the peduncle, and the peduncle remaining attached to the fruit. The squirrels, probably striped, must be very busy here nowadays. Though many twigs are bare, these clusters of brown fruit in their grayish-brown cups are unnoticed and almost invisible, unless you are looking for them, above the ground, which is strewn with their similarly colored leaves; t. e., this leaf-strewn earth has the same general gray and brown color with the twigs and fruit, and you may brush against great wreaths of fruit without noticing them. You press through dense groves full of this interesting fruit, each seeming prettier than the last. Now is the time for shrub oak acorns, then, if not for others. I see where the squirrels have left the shells on rocks and stumps. They take the acorn out of its cup on the bush, leaving the cup there with a piece bit out of its edge. The little beechnut burs are mostly empty, and the © ground is strewn with the nuts mostly empty and abortive. Yet I pluck some apparently full grown with meat. This fruit is apparently now at its height.

Rain in the night and cloudy this forenoon. We had all our dog-days in September this year. It was too dry before, even for fungi. Only the last three weeks have we had any fungi to speak of. Nowa- days I see most of the election-cake fungi, with crickets and slugs eating them. I see a cricket feeding on an apple, into which he has eaten so deep that only his posteriors project, but he does not desist a moment though I shake the apple and finally drop it on the ground. P. M. — To lygodium. One of the large black birches on Tarbell’s land is turned completely brownish-yellow and has lost half its leaves; the other is green still. I see in the corn-field above this birch, collected about the trunk of an oak, on the ground, fifty to a hundred ears of corn which have been stripped to the cob, evidently by the squirrels. Apparently a great part of the kernels remain on the ground, but in every case the germ has been eaten out. It is apparent that the squirrel prefers this part, for he has not carried off the rest. I perceive in various places, in low ground, this afternoon, the sour scent of cinnamon ferns decaying. It is an agreeable phenomenon, reminding me of the season and of past years. So many maple and pine and other leaves have now fallen that in the woods, at least, you walk over a carpet of fallen leaves. As I sat on an old pigeon-stand, not used this year, on the hill south of the swamp, at the foot of a tree, set up with perches nailed on it, a pigeon hawk, as I take it, came and perched on the tree. As if it had been wont to catch pigeons at such places. That large lechea, now so freshly green and some- times scarlet, looks as if it would make a pretty edging like box, as has been suggested. The Aster undulatus and Solidago cesia and often puberula are particularly prominent now, looking late and bright, attracting bees, ete. I see the S. cesia so covered with the little fuzzy gnats as to be whitened by them. How bright the S. puberula in sprout-lands, — its yellow wand,' — perhaps in the midst of a clump of little scarlet or dark-purple black oaks! The A. undulatus looks fairer than ever, now that flowers are more scarce. The climbing fern is perfectly fresh, — and appar- ently therefore an evergreen, — the more easily found amid the withered cinnamon and flowering ferns. Acorns generally, as I notice, — swamp white, shrub, black, and white,—are turned brown; but few are still green. Yet few, except of shrub oaks, have fallen. I hear them fall, however, as I stand under the trees. This would be the time to notice them. How much pleasanter to go along the edge of the woods, through the field in the rear of the farmhouse, whence you see only its gray roof and its haystacks, than to keep the road by its door! This we think as we return behind Martial Miles’s. I observed that many pignuts had fallen yesterday, though quite green. Some of the Umbellifere, now gone to seed, are very pretty to examine. The Cicuta maculata, for instance, the concave umbel is so well spaced, the different um- bellets (?) like so many constellations or separate sys- tems in the firmament. Hear a hylodes in the swamp.