18 April 1853 – 24 April 1853

Haverhill. — Willow and bass strip freely. Surveying Charles White’s long piece. Hear again that same nighthawk-like sound over a meadow at evening.

Saw a toad and a small snake.

Haverhill. — A peach tree in bloom.

Haverhill. — Martins.

Sunday. To and around Creek Pond and back over Parsonage Hill, Haverhill. Field horse-tailin bloom. Marsh (?) hawk, with black tips of wings. Alders about all done. Green leaves just beginning to expand. Houstonias. How affecting that, annually at this season, as surely as the sun takes a higher course in the heavens, this pure and simple little flower peeps out and spots the great globe with white in our America, its four little white or bluish petals on a slender stalk making a delicate flower about a third of an inch in diameter! What a significant, though faint, utterance of spring through the veins of earth! I see, in a pool by the Creek Brook, pretty chains of toad-spawn in double parallel crenate or serpen- tine or sometimes corkscrewing lines of black ova, close together, immersed in a light-colored jelly a third of an inch in diameter, appearing as if the two strings were one, like a lace with two scalloped black borders. This is what they were singing about. Haverhill is remarkably bare of trees and woods. The young ladies cannot tell where are the nearest woods. I saw the moon rise last night over great bare hills eastward, and it reminded me of Ossian. Saw a pretty islet in the Creek Pond on the east side covered with white pine wood, appearing from the south higher than wide and as if the trees grew out of the water. You saw the light-colored trunks six or eight feet 1853} A HAVERHILL FISHERMAN 113 beneath, and then the heavy green mass overhung the water a rod, under and beyond which you see the light surface of the pond, which gives the isle a peculiarly light and floating appearance. So much beauty does a wooded islet add to a pond. It is an object sufficiently central and insular. Dandelions. How surprising this bright-yellow disk! Why study other hieroglyphics? It is along the east side of this pond that the Indians are said to have taken their way with Hannah Dustin and her nurse in 1697 toward the Merrimack. I walked along it and thought how they might have been ambuscaded.