adjutant of the regiment.”
The guanacos (wild llama) and other animals of this genus have the habit of dropping their dung from day to day in the same heap. The Peruvian Indians use it for fuel, and are thus aided in collecting it.
Rowing up a stream which takes its rise in a mountain, you meet at last with pebbles which have been washed down from it, when many miles distant. I love to think of this kind of introduction to it.
The only quadruped native to the Falkland Islands is a large wolf-like fox. As far as he is aware, “there is no other instance in any part of the world of so small a mass of broken land, distant from a continent, possessing so large an aboriginal quadruped peculiar to itself.”
In the Falkland Isles, where other fuel is scarce, they frequently cook their beef with the bones from which the meat has been scraped. Also they have “a green little bush about the size of common heath, which has the useful property of burning while fresh and green.”
Saw a cormorant play with its fishy prey as a cat with a mouse,—eight times let it go and dive after it again.
Seminal propagation produces a more original individual than that by buds, layers, and grafts.
Some inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego having got some putrid whale’s blubber in time of famine, “an old man cut off thin slices and muttering over them, broiled them for a minute, and distributed them to the famished party, who during this time preserved a profound silence.”
This was the only evidence of any religious worship among them. It suggests that even the animals may have something divine in them and akin to revelation,—some inspirations allying them to man as to God.
“Nor is it easy to teach them our superiority except by striking a fatal blow. Like wild beasts, they do not appear to compare numbers; for each individual, if attacked, instead of retiring, will endeavor to dash your brains out with a stone, as certainly as a tiger under similar circumstances would tear you.”
“We were well clothed, and though sitting close to the fire, were far from too warm; yet these naked savages, though further off, were observed, to our great surprise, to be streaming with perspiration at undergoing such a roasting.”[197] Ehrenberg examined some of the white paint with which the Fuegians daub themselves, and found it to be composed of infusoria, including fourteen polygastrica, and four phytolitharia, inhabitants of fresh water, all old and known forms!!
Again of the Fuegians: “Simple circumstances—such as the beauty of scarlet cloth or blue beads, the absence of women, our care in washing ourselves—excited their admiration far more than any grand or complicated object, such as our ship. Bougainville has well remarked concerning these people, that they treat the ‘chef-d’œuvres de l’industrie humaine, comme ils traitent les loix de la nature es ses phénomènes.’”
He was informed of a tribe of foot Indians now changing into horse Indians apparently in Patagonia.
“With the exception of a few berries, chiefly of a dwarf arbutus, the natives [_i. e._ of Tierra del Fuego][198] eat no vegetable food a cryptogamic plant affords a staple article of food.”
No reptiles in Tierra del Fuego nor in Falkland Islands.
Describes a species of kelp there,—_Macrocystis pyrifera_. “I know few things more surprising than to see this plant growing and flourishing amidst those great breakers of the Western Ocean, which no mass of rock, let it be ever so hard, can long resist...A few [stems][199] taken together are sufficiently strong to support the weight of the large loose stones to which, in the inland channels, they grow attached; and yet some of these stones were so heavy that, when drawn to the surface, they could scarcely be lifted into a boat by one person.” Captain Cook thought that some of it grew to the length of three hundred and sixty feet. “The beds of this sea-weed, even when not of great breadth,” says D., “make excellent natural floating breakwaters. It is quite curious to see, in an exposed harbor, how soon the waves from the open sea, as they travel through the straggling stems, sink in height, and pass into smooth water.”
Number of living creatures of all orders whose existence seems to depend on the kelp; a volume might be written on them. If a forest were destroyed anywhere, so many species would not perish as if this weed were, and with the fish would go many birds and larger marine animals, and hence the Fuegian himself perchance.
Tree ferns in Van Diemen’s Land (lat. 45°) six feet in circumference.
Missionaries encountered icebergs in Patagonia in latitude corresponding to the Lake of Geneva, in a season corresponding to June in Europe. In Europe, the most southern glacier which comes down to the sea is on coast of Norway, latitude 67°,—20°, or 1230 [geographical miles] nearer the pole.
Erratic boulders not observed in the intertropical parts of the world; due to icebergs or glaciers.
Under soil perpetually frozen in North America in 56° at three feet; in Siberia in 62° at twelve to fifteen feet.
In an excursion from Valparaiso to the base of the Andes: “We unsaddled our horses near the spring, and prepared to pass the night. The evening was fine, and the atmosphere so clear that the masts of the vessels at anchor in the bay of Valparaiso, although no less than twenty-six geographical miles distant, could be distinguished clearly as little black streaks.” Anson had been surprised at the distance at which his vessels were discovered from the coast without knowing the reason,—the great height of the land and the transparency of the air.
Floating islands from four to six feet thick in Lake Tagua-tagua in central Chile; blown about.
_June 12._ Listen to music religiously, as if it were the last strain you might hear.[200] There would be this advantage in travelling in your own country, even in your own neighborhood, that you would be so thoroughly prepared to understand what you saw you would make fewer travellers’ mistakes.
Is not he hospitable who entertains thoughts?
_June 13._ Walked to Walden last night (moon not quite full) by railroad and upland wood-path, returning by Wayland road. Last full moon the elms had not leaved out,—cast no heavy shadows,—and their outlines were less striking and rich in the streets at night.
I noticed night before night before last from Fair Haven how valuable was some water by moonlight, like the river and Fair Haven Pond, though far away, reflecting the light with a faint glimmering sheen, as in the spring of the year. The water shines with an inward light like a heaven on earth. The silent depth and serenity and majesty of water! Strange that men should distinguish gold and diamonds, when these precious elements are so common. I saw a distant river by moonlight, making no noise, yet flowing, as by day, still to the sea, like melted silver reflecting the moonlight. Far away it lay encircling the earth. How far away it may look in the night, and even from a low hill how miles away down in the valley! As far off as paradise and the delectable country!
There is a certain glory attends on water by night. By it the heavens are related to the earth, undistinguishable from a sky beneath you.
And I forgot to say that after I reached the road by Potter’s bars,—or further, by Potter’s Brook,—I saw the moon suddenly reflected full from a pool. A puddle from which you may see the moon reflected, and the earth dissolved under your feet. The magical moon with attendant stars suddenly looking up with mild lustre from a window in the dark earth.
I observed also the same night a halo about my shadow in the moonlight, which I referred to the accidentally lighter color of the surrounding surface; I transferred my shadow to the darkest patches of grass, and saw the halo there equally. It serves to make the outlines of the shadow more distinct.
But now for last night. A few fireflies in the meadow. Do they shine, though invisibly, by day? Is their candle lighted by day? It is not nightfall till the whip-poor-wills begin to sing.
As I entered the Deep Cut, I was affected by beholding the first faint reflection of genuine and unmixed moonlight on the eastern sand-bank while the horizon, yet red with day, was tingeing the western side.
What an interval between those two lights! The light of the moon,—in what age of the world does that fall upon the earth? The moonlight was as the earliest and dewy morning light, and the daylight tinge reminded me much more of the night. There were the old and new dynasties opposed, contrasted, and an interval between, which time could not span. Then is night, when the daylight yields to the nightlight. It suggested an interval, a distance not recognized in history. Nations have flourished in that light.
When I had climbed the sand-bank on the left, I felt the warmer current or stratum of air on my cheek, like a blast from a furnace.
The white stems of the pines, which reflected the weak light, standing thick and close together while their lower branches were gone, reminded me that the pines are only larger grasses which rise to a chaffy head, and we the insects that crawl between them. They are particularly grass-like.
How long do the gales retain the heat of the sun? I find them retreated high up the sides of hills, especially on open fields or cleared places. Does, perchance, any of this pregnant air survive the dews of night? Can any of it be found remembering the sun of yesterday even in the morning hours. Does, perchance, some puff, some blast, survive the night on elevated clearings surrounded by the forest?
The bullfrog belongs to summer. The different frogs mark the seasons pretty well,—the peeping hyla, the dreaming frog,[201] and the bullfrog. I believe that all may be heard at last occasionally together.
I heard partridges drumming to-night as late as 9 o’clock. What singularly space penetrating and filling sound! Why am I never nearer to its source?
We do not commonly live our life out and full; we do not fill all our pores with our blood; we do not inspire and expire fully and entirely enough, so that the wave, the comber, of each inspiration shall break upon our extremest shores, rolling till it meets the sand which bounds us, and the sound of the surf come back to us. Might not a bellows assist us to breathe? That our breathing should create a wind in a calm day! We live but a fraction of our life. Why do we not let on the flood, raise the gates, and set all our wheels in motion? He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. Employ your senses.
The newspapers tell us of news not to be named even with that in its own kind which an observing man can pick up in a solitary walk, as if it gained some importance and dignity by its publicness. Do we need to be advertised each day that such is still the routine of life?[202] The tree-toad’s, too, is a summer sound.
I hear, just as the night sets in, faint notes from time to time from some sparrow (?) falling asleep,—a vesper hymn,—and later, in the woods, the chuckling, rattling sound of some unseen bird on the near trees. The nighthawk booms wide awake.
By moonlight we see not distinctly even the surface of the earth, but our daylight experience supplies us with confidence.
As I approached the pond down Hubbard’s Path, after coming out of the woods into a warmer air, I saw the shimmering of the moon on its surface, and, in the near, now flooded cove, the water-bugs, darting, circling about, made streaks or curves of light. The moon’s inverted pyramid of shimmering light commenced about twenty rods off, like so much micaceous sand. But I was startled to see midway in the dark water a bright flamelike, more than phosphorescent light crowning the crests of the wavelets, which at first I mistook for fireflies, and thought even of cucullos.[203] It had the appearance of a pure, smokeless flame a half-dozen inches long, issuing from the water and bending flickeringly along its surface. I thought of St. Elmo’s lights and the like. But, coming near to the shore of the pond itself, these flames increased, and I saw that even this was so many broken reflections of the moon’s disk, though one would have said they were of an intenser light than the moon herself; from contrast with the surrounding water they were. Standing up close to the shore and nearer the rippled surface, I saw the reflections of the moon sliding down the watery concave like so many lustrous burnished coins poured from a bag with inexhaustible lavishness, and the lambent flames on the surface were much multiplied, seeming to slide along a few inches with each wave before they were extinguished; and I saw how farther and farther off they gradually merged in the general sheen, which, in fact, was made up of a myriad little mirrors reflecting the disk of the moon with equal brightness to an eye rightly placed. The pyramid or sheaf of light which we see springing from near where we stand only, in fact, is the outline of that portion of the shimmering surface which an eye takes in. To myriad eyes suitably placed, the whole surface of the pond would be seen to shimmer, or rather it would be seen, as the waves turned up their mirrors, to be covered with those bright flame-like reflections of the moon’s disk, like a myriad candles everywhere issuing from the waves; _i. e._ if there were as many eyes as angles presented by the waves, the whole surface would appear as bright as the moon; and these reflections are dispersed in all directions into the atmosphere, flooding it with light. No wonder that water reveals itself so far by night; even further in many states of the atmosphere than by day. I thought at first it [was] some unusual phosphorescence.
In some positions these flames were star-like points, brighter than the brightest stars. Suddenly a flame would show itself in a near and dark space, precisely like some inflammable gas on the surface,—as if an inflammable gas made its way up from the bottom.
I heard my old musical, simple-noted owl. The sound of the _dreaming_ frogs[204] prevails over the others. Occasionally a bullfrog near me made an obscene noise, a sound like an eructation, near me. I think they must be imbodied eructations. They suggest flatulency.
The pond is higher than ever, so as to hinder fishermen, and I could hardly get to the true shore here on account of the bushes. I pushed out in a boat a little and heard the chopping of the waves under its bow. And on the bottom I saw the moving reflections of the shining waves, faint streaks of light revealing the shadows of the waves or the opaqueness of the water.
As I climbed the hill again toward my old bean-field, I listened to the ancient, familiar, immortal, dear cricket sound under all others, hearing at first some distinct chirps; but when these ceased I was aware of the general earth-song, which my hearing had not heard, amid which these were only taller flowers in a bed, and I wondered if behind or beneath this there was not some other chant yet more universal. Why do we not hear when this begins in the spring? and when it ceases in the fall? Or is it too gradual?
After I have got into the road I have no thought to record all the way home,—the walk is comparatively barren. The leafy elm sprays seem to droop more by night (??).
_June 14. Saturday._ Full moon last night. Set out on a walk to Conantum at 7 P. M. A serene evening, the sun going down behind clouds, a few white or slightly shaded piles of clouds floating in the eastern sky, but a broad, clear, mellow cope left for the moon to rise into.
An evening for poets to describe. Met a man driving home his cow from pasture and stopping to chat with his neighbor; then a boy, who had set down his pail in the road to stone a bird most perseveringly, whom I heard afterward behind me telling his pail to be quiet in a tone of assumed anger, because it squeaked under his arm. As I proceed along the back road I hear the lark still singing in the meadow, and the bobolink, and the gold robin on the elms, and the swallows twittering about the barns. A small bird chasing a crow high in the air, who is going home at night. All nature is in an expectant attitude. Before Goodwin’s house, at the opening of the Sudbury road, the swallows are diving at a tortoise-shell cat, who curvets and frisks rather awkwardly, as if she did not know whether to be scared or not. And now, having proceeded a little way down this road, the sun having buried himself in the low cloud in the west and hung out his crimson curtains,[205] I hear, while sitting by the wall, the sound of the stake-driver at a distance,—like that made by a man pumping in a neighboring farmyard, watering his cattle, or like chopping wood before his door on a frosty morning,[206] and I can imagine like driving a stake in a meadow. The pumper. I immediately went in search of the bird, but, after going a third of a mile, it did not sound much nearer, and the two parts of the sound did not appear to proceed from the same place. What is the peculiarity of these sounds which penetrate so far on the keynote of nature? At last I got near to the brook in the meadow behind Hubbard’s wood, but I could not tell if [it] were further or nearer than that. When I got within half a dozen rods of the brook, it ceased, and I heard it no more. I suppose that I scared it. As before I was further off than I thought, so now I was nearer than I thought.
It is not easy to understand how so small a creature can make so loud a sound by merely sucking in or throwing out water with pump-like lungs.[207] As yet no moon, but downy piles of cloud scattered here and there in the expectant sky.
Saw a blue flag blossom in the meadow while waiting for the stake-driver.
It was a sound as of gulping water.
Where my path crosses the brook in the meadow there is a singularly sweet scent in the heavy air bathing the brakes, where the brakes grow,—the fragrance of the earth, as if the dew were a distillation of the fragrant essences of nature. When I reach the road, the farmer going home from town invites me to ride in his high-set wagon, not thinking why I walk, nor can I shortly explain. He remarks on the coolness of the weather. The angelica is budded, a handsome luxuriant plant. And now my senses are captivated again by a sweet fragrance as I enter the embowered willow causeway, and I know not if it be from a particular plant or all together,—sweet-scented vernal grass or sweet-briar. Now the sun is fairly gone, I hear the dreaming frog,[208] and the whip-poor-will from some _darker_ wood,—it is not far from eight,—and the cuckoo. The song sparrows sing quite briskly among the willows, as if it were spring again, and the blackbird’s harsher note resounds over the meadows, and the veery’s comes up from the wood.
Fishes are dimpling the surface of the river, seizing the insects which alight. A solitary fisherman in his boat inhabits the scene. As I rose the hill beyond the bridge, I found myself in a cool, fragrant, dewy, up-country, mountain morning air, a new region. (When I had issued from the willows on to the bridge, it was like coming out of night into twilight, the river reflected so much light.) The moon was now seen rising over Fair Haven and at the same time reflected in the river, pale and white like a silvery cloud, barred with a cloud, not promising how it will shine anon. Now I meet an acquaintance coming from a remote field in his hay-rigging, with a jag of wood; who reins up to show me how large a woodchuck he has killed, which he found eating his clover.
But now he must drive on, for behind comes a boy taking up the whole road with a huge roller drawn by a horse, which goes lumbering and bouncing along, getting out of the way of night,—while the sun has gone the other way,—and making such a noise as if it had the contents of a tinker’s shop in its bowels, and rolls the whole road smooth like a newly sown grain-field.
In Conant’s orchard I hear the faint cricket-like song of a sparrow saying its vespers, as if it were a link between the cricket and the bird. The robin sings now, though the moon shines silverly, and the veery jingles its trill. I hear the fresh and refreshing sound of falling water, as I have heard it in New Hampshire. It is a sound we do not commonly hear. I see that the whiteweed is in blossom, which, as I had not walked by day for some time, I had not seen before.
How moderate, deliberate, is Nature! How gradually the shades of night gather and deepen, giving man ample leisure to bid farewell to-day, conclude his day’s affairs, and prepare for slumber! The twilight seems out of proportion to the length of the day. Perchance it saves our eyes. Now for some hours the farmers have been getting home.
Since the alarm about mad dogs a couple of years ago there are comparatively few left to bark at the traveller and bay the moon. All nature is abandoned to me.
You feel yourself—your body, your legs,—more at night, for there is less beside to be distinctly known, and hence perhaps you think yourself more tired than you are. I see indistinctly oxen asleep in the fields, silent in majestic slumber, like the sphinx,—statuesque, Egyptian, reclining. What solid rest! How their heads are supported!
A sparrow or a cricket makes more noise. From Conant’s summit I hear as many as fifteen whip-poor-wills—or whip-or-I-wills—at once, the succeeding cluck sounding strangely foreign, like a hewer at work elsewhere.
The moon is accumulating yellow light and triumphing over the clouds, but still the west is suffused here and there with a slight red tinge, marking the path of the day. Though inexperienced ones might call it night, it is not yet. Dark, heavy clouds lie along the western horizon, exhibiting the forms of animals and men, while the moon is behind a cloud. Why do we detect these forms so readily?—whales or giants reclining, busts of heroes, Michael-Angelic. There is the gallery of statuary, the picture gallery of man,—not a board upon an Italian’s head, but these dark figures along the horizon,—the board some Titan carries on his head. What firm and heavy outlines for such soft and light material!
How sweet and encouraging it is to hear the sound of some artificial music from the midst of woods or from the top of a hill at night, borne on the breeze from some distant farmhouse,—the human voice or a flute!
That is a civilization one can endure, worth having. I could go about the world listening for the strains of music. Men use this gift but sparingly, methinks. What should we think of a bird which had the gift of song but used it only once in a dozen years, like the tree which blossoms only once in a century?
Now the dorbug comes humming by, the first I have heard this year. In three months it will be the Harvest Moon. I cannot easily believe it.
Why not call this the Traveller’s Moon? It would be as true to call the last (the May) the Planter’s Moon as it is to call September’s the Harvest Moon, for the farmers use one about as little as the other.
Perhaps this is the Whip-poor-will’s Moon. The bullfrog now, which I have not heard before, this evening. It is nearly nine. They are much less common and their note more intermittent than that of the dreamers.
I scared up a bird on a _low_ bush, perchance on its nest. It is rare that you start them at night from such places.
Peabody says that the nighthawk retires to rest about the time the whip-poor-will begins its song. The whip-poor-will begins now at 7.30. I hear the nighthawk after 9 o’clock. He says it flies low in the evening, but it also flies high, as it must needs do to make the booming sound.
I hear the lowing of cows occasionally, and the barking of dogs.
The pond by moonlight, which may make the object in a walk, suggests little to be said. Where there was only one firefly in a dozen rods, I hastily ran to one which had crawled up to the top of a grass-head and exhibited its light, and instantly another sailed in to it, showing its light also; but my presence made them extinguish their lights.
The latter retreated, and the former crawled slowly down the stem.
It appeared to me that the first was a female who thus revealed her place to the male, who was also making known his neighborhood as he hovered about, both showing their lights that they might come together.
It was like a mistress who had climbed to the turrets of her castle and exhibited there a blazing taper for a signal, while her lover had displayed his light on the plain. If perchance she might have any lovers abroad.
Not much before 10 o’clock does the moonlight night begin. When man is asleep and day fairly forgotten, then is the beauty of moonlight seen over lonely pastures where cattle are silently feeding.[209] Then let me walk in a diversified country, of hill and dale, with heavy woods one side, and copses and scattered trees and bushes enough to give me shadows. Returning, a mist is on the river. The river is taken into the womb of Nature again.
Now is the clover month, but haying is not yet begun.
Overtaken by a slight shower. The same increased fragrance from the ground—sweet-fern, etc.—as in the night, and for the like reason probably. The houstonias still blossom freshly, as I believe they continue to do all summer. The fever-root in blossom; pictured in Hill, under the wall, looks somewhat like a milkweed. The _Viburnum dentatum_, very regularly toothed, just ready to blossom; sometimes called arrow-wood.
Nature seems not [to] have designed that man should be much abroad by night, and in the moon proportioned the light fitly. By the faintness and rareness of the light compared with that of the sun, she expresses her intention with regard to him.
Finds runaway sailors on the Chonos Archipelago, who he thought “had kept a very good reckoning of time,” having lost only four days in fifteen months.
Near same place, on the islands of the archipelago, he found wild potato, the tallest four feet high, tubers generally small but one two inches in diameter; “resembled in every respect, and had the same smell as English potatoes; but when boiled they shrunk much, and were watery and insipid, without any bitter taste.”
Speaking of the surf on the coast of Chiloe, “I was assured that, after a heavy gale, the roar can be heard at night even at Castro, a distance of no less than twenty-one sea-miles, across a hilly and wooded country.”
Subsidence and elevation of the west coast of South America and of the Cordilleras. “Daily it is forced home on the mind of the geologist, that nothing, not even the wind that blows, is so unstable as the level of the crust of this earth.”
Would like to see Sir Francis Head’s travels in South America,—Pampas perhaps.[210] Also Chambers’ “Sea Levels.” Also travels of Spix and Von Martius.
It is said that hydrophobia was first known in South America in 1803.
At the Galapagos, the tortoises going to any place travel night and day and so get there sooner than would be expected,—about eight miles in two or three days. He rode on their backs.
The productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, from five to six hundred miles from America, are still of the American type. “It was most striking to be surrounded by new birds, new reptiles, new shells, new insects, new plants, and yet, by innumerable trifling details of structure, and even by the tones of voice and plumage of the birds, to have the temperate plains of Patagonia, or the hot, dry deserts of Northern Chile, vividly brought before my eyes.” What is most singular, not only are the plants, etc., to a great extent peculiar to these islands, but each for the most part has its own kinds, though they are within sight of each other.
Birds so tame that they can be killed with a stick. _I_ would suggest that, from having dealt so long with the inoffensive and slow-moulded tortoise, they have not yet acquired an instinctive fear of man, who is a new-comer. Methinks tortoises, lizards, etc., for wild creatures are remarkable for the nearness to which man approaches them and handles them, as logs,—cold-blooded, lumpish forms of life,—only taking care not to step into their mouths. An alligator has been known to have come out of the mud like a mud volcano where was now the floor of a native’s hut.
“The common dock is...widely disseminated, [in New Zealand][211] and will, I fear, forever remain a proof of the rascality of an Englishman, who sold the seeds for those of the tobacco plant.”
The New-Hollanders a little higher in the scale of civilization than the Fuegians.
Puzzled by a “well rounded fragment of greenstone, rather larger than a man’s head,” which a captain had found on a small coral circle or atoll near Keeling Island, “where every other particle of matter is calcareous,” about six hundred miles from Sumatra. D. agrees with Kotzebue (_vide_ Kotzebue) who states that (Darwin’s words) “the inhabitants of the Radack Archipelago, a group of lagoon-islands in the midst of the Pacific, obtained stones for sharpening their instruments by searching the roots of trees which are cast upon the beach,” and “laws have been established that such stones belong to the chief, and a punishment is inflicted on any one who attempts to steal them.” Let geologists look out. “Some natives carried by Kotzebue to Kamtschatka collected stones to take back to their country.”
Found no bottom at 7200 feet, and 2200 yards from shore of Keeling Island, a coral isle.
His theory of the formation of coral isles by the subsidence of the land appears probable. He concludes that “the great continents are, for the most part, rising areas; and...the central parts of the great oceans are sinking areas.”
Not a _private_ person on the island of Ascension; the inhabitants are paid and victualled by the British government. Springs, cisterns, etc., are managed by the same. “Indeed, the whole island may be compared to a huge ship kept in first-rate order.”
_Vide_ “Circumnavigation of Globe up to Cook.”
_Vide_ “Voyages Round the World since Cook.”
* * * * * The author of the article on Orchids in the _Eclectic_ says that “a single plant produced three different flowers of genera previously supposed to be quite distinct.”
Saw the first wild rose to-day on the west side of the railroad causeway. The whiteweed has suddenly appeared, and the clover gives whole fields a rich and florid appearance,—the rich red and the sweet-scented white. The fields are blushing with the red species as the western sky at evening. The blue-eyed grass, well named, looks up to heaven. And the yarrow, with its persistent dry stalks and heads, is now ready to blossom again. The dry stems and heads of last year’s tansy stand high above the new green leaves.
I sit in the shade of the pines to hear a wood thrush at noon. The ground smells of dry leaves; the heat is oppressive. The bird begins on a low strain, _i. e._ it first delivers a strain on a lower key, then a moment after another a little higher, then another still varied from the others,—no two successive strains alike, but either ascending or descending. He confines himself to his few notes, in which he is unrivalled, as if his kind had learned this and no more anciently.
I perceive, as formerly, a white froth dripping from the pitch pines, just at the base of the new shoots. It has no taste. The pollywogs in the pond are now full-tailed. The hickory leaves are blackened by a recent frost, which reminds me that this is near their northern limit.
It is remarkable the rapidity with which the grass grows. The 25th of May I walked to the hills in Wayland, and when I returned across lots do not remember that I had much occasion to think of the grass, or to go round any fields to avoid treading on it; but just a week afterward, at Worcester, it was high and waving in the fields, and I was to some extent confined to the road; and the same was the case here.
Apparently in one month you get from fields which you can cross without hesitation, to haying time. It has grown you hardly know when, be the weather what it may, sunshine or storm. I start up a solitary woodcock in the shade, in some copse; goes off with a startled, rattling, hurried note.
After walking by night several times I now walk by day, but I am not aware of any crowning advantage in it. I see small objects better, but it does not enlighten me any. The day is more trivial.
What a careful gardener Nature is! She does not let the sun come out suddenly with all his intensity after rain and cloudy weather, but graduates the change to suit the tenderness of plants.
I see the tall crowfoot now in the meadows (_Ranunculus acris_), with a smooth stem. I do not notice the _bulbosus_, which was so common a fortnight ago. The rose-colored flowers of the _Kalmia angustifolia_, lambkill, just opened and opening. The _Convallaria bifolia_ growing stale in the woods. The _Hieracium venosum_, veiny-leaved hawkweed, with its yellow blossoms in the woodland path. The _Hypoxis erecta_, yellow Bethlehem-star, where there is a thick, wiry grass in open paths; should be called yellow-eyed grass, methinks. The _Pyrola asarifolia_, with its pagoda-like stem of flowers, _i. e_. broad-leaved wintergreen. The _Trientalis Americana_, like last, in the woods, with its star-like white flower and pointed whorled leaves. The prunella too is in blossom, and the rather delicate _Thesium umbellatum_, a white flower. The Solomon’s-seal, with a greenish drooping raceme of flowers at the top, I do not identify.
I notice to-day the same remarkable bushy growth on the fir (in Wheildon’s garden) that I have noticed on the pines and cedars. The leaves are not so thickly set and are much stiffer.
I find that I postpone all actual intercourse with my friends to a certain real intercourse which takes place commonly when we are actually at a distance from one another.
_June 22. Sunday._ Is the shrub with yellow blossoms which I found last week near the Lincoln road while surveying for E. Hosmer and thought to be _Xylosteum ciliatum_, or fly honeysuckle, the same with the yellow diervilla which I find in Laurel Glen to-day?
The birch is the surveyor’s tree. It makes the best stakes to look at through the sights of a compass, except when there is snow on the ground. Their white bark was not made in vain. In surveying wood-lots I have frequent occasion to say this is what they were made for.
I see that Dugan has trimmed off and peeled the limbs of the willows on the Turnpike to sell at the Acton powder-mill. I believe they get eight dollars a cord for this wood.
I. Hapgood of Acton got me last Friday to compare the level of his cellar-bottom with his garden, for, as he says, when Robbins & Wetherbee keep the water of Nashoba Brook back so as to flood his garden, it comes into his cellar. I found that part of the garden five inches lower than the cellar-bottom. Men are affected in various ways by the actions of others. If a man far away builds a dam, I have water in my cellar. He said that the water was sometimes a foot deep in the garden.
We are enabled to criticise others only when we are different from, and