17 October 1853 – 23 October 1853

P. M.— With Sophia boated to Fair Haven, where she made a sketch. The red maples have been bare a good while. In the sun and this clear air, their bare ashy branches even sparkle like silver. ‘The woods are losing their bright colors. ‘The muskrat-houses are more sharpened now. I find my boat all covered — the bottom and seats — with the yellow leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and if I empty it, it is full again to-morrow.’ Some white oaks are salmon-red, some lighter and drier. ‘The black oaks are a green- ish yellow. Poplars (grandidentata) clear, rich yellow. How like some black rocks that stand in the river are these muskrat-houses! They are singularly con- spicuous for the dwellings of animals. The river is quite low now, lower than for many weeks, and accordingly the white lily pads have their stems too long, and they rise above the water four or five inches and are looped over and downward to the sunken pad with its face down. ‘They make a singular appearance. Returning late, we see a double shadow of ourselves and boat, one, the true, quite black, the other directly above it and very faint, on the willows and high bank.

Wednesday. Paddled E. Hoar and Mrs. King up the North Branch. A seed of wild oat left on. The leaves have fallen so plentifully that they quite conceal the water along the shore, and rustle pleasantly when the wave which the boat creates strikes them. On Sunday last, I could hardly find the Corner Spring, and suspected even it had dried up, for it was com- pletely concealed by fresh-fallen leaves, and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was like striking the earth for a new spring. At Beck Stow’s, surveying, thinking to step upon a leafy shore from a rail, I got into water more than a foot deep and had to wring my stockings out; but this is anticipating.’

How pleasant to walk over beds of these fresh, crisp, and rustling fallen leaves, — young hyson, green tea, clean, crisp, and wholesome! How beautiful they go to their graves! how gently lay themselves down and turn to mould!— painted of a thousand hues and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their graves, light and frisky. They put on no weeds. Merrily they go scampering over the earth, selecting their graves, whispering all through the woods about it. They that waved so loftily, how contentedly they return to dust again and are laid low, resigned to lie and decay at the foot of the tree and afford nour- ishment to new generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! How they are mixed up, all species, —oak and maple and chestnut and birch! They are about to add a leaf’s breadth to the depth of the soil. We are all the richer for their decay. Nature is not cluttered with them. She is a perfect husbandman; she stores them all.? While I was wringing my wet stockings (vide last page), sitting by the side of Beck Stow’s, I heard a rush of wings, looked up, and saw three dusky ducks swiftly circling over the small water. They rounded far away, but soon returned and settled within about four rods. They first survey the spot. Wonder they did not see me. At first they are suspicious, hold up their heads and sail about. Do they not see me through the thin border of leafless bushes? At last one dips his bill, and they begin to feed amid the pads. I sud- denly rise, and [they] instantly dive as at a flash, then at once rise again and all go off, with a low wiry note.

A week or more of fairest Indian summer ended last night, for to-day it rains. It was so warm day before yesterday, I worked in my shirt-sleeves in the woods. I cannot easily dismiss the subject of the fallen leaves. How densely they cover and conceal the water for sev- eral feet in width, under and amid the alders and button-bushes and maples along the shore of the river, — still light, tight, and dry boats, dense cities of boats, their fibres not relaxed by the waters, undulating and rustling with every wave, of such various pure and delicate, though fading, tints, —of hues that might make the fame of teas, — dried on great Nature’s cop- pers. And then see this great fleet of scattered leaf boats, still tight and dry, each one curled up on every side by the sun’s skill, like boats of hide, scarcely moving in the sluggish current, — like the great fleets with which you mingle on entering some great mart, some New York which we are all approaching to- gether. Or else they are slowly moving round in some great eddy which the river makes, where the water is deep and the current is wearing into the bank. How gently each has been deposited on the water! No violence has been used toward them yet. But next the shore, as thick as foam they float, and when you turn your prow that way, list! what a rustling of the crisped waves! Wet grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them, and many a wet foot you get in consequence. Consider what a vast crop is thus annually shed upon the earth. This, more than any mere grain or seed, is the great harvest of the year. This annual decay and death, this dying by inches, before the whole tree at last lies down and turns to soil. As trees shed their leaves, so deer their horns, and men their hair or nails. The year’s great crop. I am more inter- ested in it than in the English grass alone or in the corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future corn- fields on which the earth fattens. They teach us how to die. How many flutterings before they rest quietly in their graves! A myriad wrappers for germinating seeds. By what subtle chemistry they will mount up again, climbing by the sap in the trees. The ground is all parti-colored with them. For beautiful variety can any crop be compared with them? The dogwood (poison sumach) blazing its sins as scarlet, the early-blushing maple, the rich chrome (?) yellow of the poplar, the mulberry ash, the brilliant red huckleberry with which the hills’ backs are painted like sheep’s, — not merely the plain flavidness of corn, but all the colors of the rainbow. The salmon-colored oaks, etc., etc. The frost touches them, and, with the slightest breath of day or jarring of earth’s axle, see in what showers they come floating down, at the first earnest touch of autumn’s wand. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years by subtiler chemistry, and the sapling’s first fruits, thus ‘ shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.’ Yesterday, toward night, gave Sophia and mother a sail as far as the Battle-Ground. One-eyed John Goodwin, the fisherman, was loading into a hand-cart and conveying home the piles of driftwood which of late he had collected with his boat. It was a beautiful evening, and a clear amber sunset lit up all the eastern shores; and that man’s employment, so simple and direct, — though he is regarded by most as a vicious character, — whose whole motive was so easy to fathom, '—thus to obtain his winter’s wood, — charmed me unspeakably. So much do we love actions that are simple. They are all poetic. We, too, would fain be so employed. So unlike the pursuits of most men, so artificial or complicated. Consider how the broker collects his winter’s wood, what sport he makes of it, what is his boat and hand-cart! Postponing instant life, he makes haste to Boston in the cars, and there deals in stocks, not quite relishing his employment, —and so earns the money with which he buys his fuel. And when, by chance, I meet him’ about this indirect and complicated business, I am not struck with the beauty of his employment. It does not harmonize with the sunset. How much more the former consults his genius, some genius at any rate! Now I should love to get my fuel so, — I have got some so, — but though I may be glad to have it, I do not love to get it in any other way less simple and direct. For if I buy one necessary of life, I cheat myself to some extent, I deprive myself of the pleasure, the inexpressible joy, which is the unfailing reward of satisfying any want of our na- ture simply and truly. No trade is simple, but artificial and complex. It postpones life and substitutes death. It goes against the grain. If the first generation does not die of it, the third or fourth does. In face of all statistics, I will never believe that it is the descendants of tradesmen who keep the state alive, but of simple yeomen or laborers. This, indeed, statistics say of the city rein- forced by the country. The oldest, wisest politician grows not more human so, but is merely a gray wharf rat at last. He makes a habit of disregarding the moral right and wrong for the legal or political, commits a slow suicide, and thinks to recover by retiring on to a farm at last. This simplicity it is, and the vigor it imparts, that enables the simple vagabond, though he does get drunk and is sent to the house of correction so often, to hold up his head among men. “Tf I go to Boston every day and sell tape from morning till night,’ says the merchant (which we will admit is not a beautiful action), “some time or other I shall be able to buy the best of fuel without stint.” Yes, but not the pleasure of picking it up by the river- side, which, I may say, is of more value than the warmth it yields, for it but keeps the vital heat in us that we may repeat such pleasing exercises. It warms us twice, and the first warmth is the most wholesome and memorable, compared with which the other is mere coke. It is to give no account of my employment to say that I cut wood to keep me from freezing, or cultivate beans to keep me from starving. Oh, no, the greatest value of these labors is received before the wood is teamed home, or the beans are harvested (or winnowed from it). Goodwin stands on the solid earth. The earth looks solider under him, and for such as he no political economies, with their profit and loss, supply and demand, need ever be written, for they will need to use no policy. As for the complex ways of living, I love them not, however much I practice them. In as many places as possible, I will get my feet down to the earth. There is no secret in his trade, more than in the sun’s. It is no mystery how he gets his living; no, not even when he steals it. But there is less double-dealing in his living than in your trade. Goodwin is a most constant fisherman. He must well know the taste of pickerel by this time. He will fish, I would not venture to say how many days in succession. When I can remember to have seen him fishing almost daily for some time, if it rains, ] am surprised on looking out to see him slowly wending his way to the river in his oilcloth coat, with his basket and pole. I saw him the other day fishing in the middle of the stream, the day after I had seen him fishing on the shore, while by a kind of magic I sailed by him; and he said he was catching minnow for bait in the winter. When I was twenty rods off, he held up a pickerel that weighed two and a half pounds, which he had forgot to show me before, and the next morning, as he afterward told me, he caught one that weighed three pounds. If it is ever necessary to appoint a com- mittee on fish-ponds and pickerel, let him be one of them. Surely he is tenacious of life, hard to scale.

Sunday. P. M. — Down railroad to chest- nut wood on Pine Hill. A pleasant day, but breezy. I see a downy wood- pecker tapping an apple tree, and hear, when I have passed, his sharp, metallic note. I notice these flowers still along the railroad causeway: fresh sprouts from the root of the Solidago nemoralis in bloom, one or two fall dandelions, red clover and white, yarrow, Trifolium arvense (perhaps not fresh), one small blue snapdragon, fresh tansy in bloom on the sunny sand- bank. ‘There are green leaves on the ends of elder twigs ; blackberry vines still red; apple trees yellow and brown and partly bare; white ash bare (nearly); golden willows yellow and brown; white birches, ex- posed, are nearly bare; some pines still parti-colored. White, black, and red oaks ‘still hold most of their leaves. What a peculiar red has the white! And some black have now a rich brown. The Populus grandiden- tata near railroad, bare; the P. tremuloides, half bare. The hickories are finely crisped, yellow, more or less browned. Several yellow butterflies in the meadow. And many birds flit before me along the railroad, with faint notes, too large for linarias. Can they be tree sparrows? Some weeks.!. Many phenomena re- mind me that now is to some extent a second spring, —not only the new-springing and blossoming of flowers, but the peeping of the hylodes for some time, and the faint warbling of their spring notes by many birds. Everywhere in the fields I see the white, hoary (ashy-colored) sceptres of the gray goldenrod. Others are slightly yellowish still. The yellow is gone out of them, as the last flake of sunshine disappears from a field when the clouds are gathering. But though their golden hue is gone, their reign is not over. Compact puffed masses of seeds ready to take wing. They will send out their ventures from hour to hour the winter through. The Viola pedata looking up from so low in the wood-path makes a singular impression. I go through Brooks’s Hollow. The hazels bare, only here and there a few sere, curled leaves on them. The red cherry is bare. ‘The blue flag seed-vessels at Walden are bursting, — six closely packed brown rows. I find my clothes all bristling as with a chevauz- de-frise of beggar-ticks, which hold on for many days. A storm of arrows these weeds have showered on me, as I went through their moats. How irksome the task to rid one’s self of them! We are fain to let some adhere. Through thick and thin I wear some; hold on many days. In an instant a thousand seeds of the bidens fastened themselves firmly to my clothes, and * Probably the white-in-tail [7. e. vesper sparrow, or grass finch]. I carried them for miles, planting one here and another there. They are as thick on my clothes as the teeth of a comb. The prinos is bare, leaving red berries. The pond has gone down suddenly and surprisingly since I was here last, and this pool is left, cut off at a higher level, stagnant and drying up. This is its first decided going down since its going up a year or two ago. The red- looking water purslane is left bare, and the water- target leaves are turned brown and drying up on the bare mud. The clethra partly bare, crisped, yellowish and brown, with its fruit with persistent styles (?) in long racemes. Here are dense fields of light-colored rattlesnake grass drooping with the weight of their seeds. The high blueberries about the pond have still a few leaves left on, turned bright scarlet red. These it is adorn the shore so, seen at a distance, small but very bright. The panicled andromeda is thinly clad with yellow and brown leaves, not sere. Alders are green. Smooth sumach bare. Chestnuts commonly bare. I now notice the round red buds of the high blueberry. The blue-stemmed, and also the white, solidago on Walden bank. Small sassafras trees bare. The Aster undulatus is still quite abundant and fresh on this high, sunny bank, -—far more so than the Solidago cesia, — and methinks it is the latest of our asters and is besides the most common or conspicuous flower now. It is in large, dense masses, two or three feet high, pale purple or whitish, and covered with humble- bees. ‘The radical leaves, now hearted and crenatish, ‘are lake beneath. Also a hieracium quite freshly bloomed, but with white, bristly leaves and smooth “stem, about twenty-flowered; peduncles and involu- cres glandular-hairy. Is it Gronovii or veiny-leaved ? Almost as slender as the panicled. (In press.) No gerardias. Strawberries are red and green. It is the season of fuzzy seeds, — goldenrods, everlasting, se- necio, asters, epilobium, etc., ete. Viburnum Lentago, with ripe berries and dull-glossy red leaves; young black cherry, fresh green or yellow; mayweed. The chestnuts have mostly fallen. One Dzplopappus linariwfolius in bloom, its leaves all yellow or red. This and A. undulatus the asters seen to-day. The red oak now red, perhaps inclining to scarlet ; the white, with that peculiar ingrained redness; the shrub oak, a clear thick leather-color; some dry black oak, darker brown; chestnut, light brown ; hickory, yellow, turning brown. ‘These the colors of some leaves I brought home.