7 November 1859 – 13 November 1859

A pleasant day. P. M. — To Nut Meadow and Fair Haven Hill. I hear a small z-ing cricket. Coombs says that quite a little flock of pigeons bred here last summer. He found one nest in a small white . pine near his pigeon-stand (where he baited them in the summer), so low he could put his hand in it(!?). I saw, while talking with him, a trout playing about in the open roadside watering-place, on the Jimmy Miles road (7. e. in Nut Meadow Brook), which was appar- ently fifteen inches long; not lurking under the bank but openly swimming up and down in midstream. How richly and exuberantly downy are many golden- rod and aster heads now, their seed just on the point of falling or being blown away, before they are in the least weather-beaten! ‘They are now puffed up to their utmost, clean and light.’ The tufts of purplish withered andropogon in With- erell Glade are still as fair as ever, soft and trembling and bending from the wind; of a very light mouse-color seen from the side of the sun, and as delicate as the most fragile ornaments of a lady’s bonnet; but looking to- ward the sun they are a brilliant white, each polished hair (of the pappus?) reflecting the November sun without its heats, not in the least yellowish or brown like the goldenrods and asters.

A fine Indian-summer day. Have had pleasant weather about a week.’

Rain; warm.

Windy and cooler. I observed, October 23d, wood turtles copulating in the Assabet, and a flock of goldfinches on the top of a hemlock, — as if after its seeds? Also, October 24th, riding home from Acton, I saw the withered leaves blown from an oak by the roadside dashing off, gyrating, and surging upward into the air, so exactly like a flock of birds sporting with one another that, for a minute at least, I could not be sure they were not birds; and it suggested how far the motions of birds, » like those of these leaves, might be determined by cur- rents of air, 2. e., how far the bird learns to conform to such currents. The flat variety of Lycopodium dendroideum shed pollen on the 25th of October. That ’s a lycopodium path on north side of Colburn Hill.

The first sprinkling of snow, which for a short time whitens the ground in spots. I do not know how to distinguish between our wak- ing life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are? Fear creates danger, and courage dispels it. There was a remarkable sunset, I think the 25th of October. The sunset sky reached quite from west to east, and it was the most varied in its forms and colors of any that I remember to have seen. At one time the clouds were most softly and delicately rippled, like the ripple-marks on sand. But it was hard for me to see its beauty then, when my mind was filled with Captain Brown. So great a wrong as his fate implied overshad- owed all beauty in the world.