9 June 1856 – 15 June 1856

8 a. M. — Getting lily pads opposite Bad- ger’s. Already the pads are much eaten before they are grown, and underneath, on the under side of almost every one, are the eggs of various species of insect, some so minute as to escape detection at first, in close, flat, straight-sided nests. The yellow lily and kalmiana are abundantly out. The under sides of the pads, their stems, and the Ranunculus Purshit and other water-plants are thickly covered and defiled with the sloughs, perhaps of those little fuzzy gnats (in their first state) which have so swarmed over the river. It is quite difficult to clean your specimens of them. P. M. — To Dugan Desert. Cornus alternifolia a day or two, up railroad; maybe longer elsewhere. Spergularia rubra by railroad, it having been dug up last year, and so delayed. The cuckoo of June 5th has deserted her nest, and I find the fragments of egg-shells in it; probably because I found it. Oxalis freshly out: how long? Apparently but two or three days. I find some linnea well out, after all, within a rod of the top of the hill, apparently two or three days. If it flowered more abundantly, probably it would be earlier. Chewink’s nest with four young in the dry sprout-land of Loring’s thick wood that was, under a completely overarching tuft of dry sedge grass. I hear the huckleberry-bird now add to its usual strain a-tea tea tea tea tea. A painted tortoise laying her eggs ten feet from the wheel-track on the Marlborough road. She paused at first, but I sat down within two feet, and she soon resumed her work. Had excavated a hollow about five inches wide and six long in the moistened sand, and cautiously, with long intervals, she continued her work, resting always on the same spot her fore feet, and never looking round, her eye shut all but a narrow slit. Whenever I moved, perhaps to brush off a mosquito, she paused. A wagon approached, rumbling afar off, and then there was a pause, till it had passed and long, long after, a tedious, naturlangsam pause of the slow-blooded crea- ture, a sacrifice of time such as those animals are up to which slumber half a year and live for centuries. It was twenty minutes before I discovered that she was not making the hole but filling it up slowly, having laid her eggs. She drew the moistened sand under herself, scraping it along from behind with both feet brought together, the claws turned inward. In the long pauses the ants troubled her (as mosquitoes me) by running over her eyes, which made her snap or dart out her head suddenly, striking the shell. She did not dance on the sand, nor finish covering the hollow quite so carefully as the one observed last year. She went off suddenly (and quickly at first), with a slow but sure instinct through the wood toward the swamp. The clustered blackberry of Dugan Desert not yet out, nor apparently for two or three days. Sweet viburnum apparently two or three days at most, by Warren Miles’s, Nut Meadow Pond. In a hollow apple tree, hole eighteen inches deep, young pigeon woodpeckers, large and well feathered. They utter their squeaking hiss whenever I cover the hole with my hand, apparently taking it for the approach of the mother. A strong, rank fetid smell issues from the hole. dé Ripe strawberries, even in a meadow on sand thrown out of a ditch, hard at first to detect amid the red radical leaves. The flower-buds of late there have now that rank smell. Lambkill out, at Clamshell. The Crategus Crus-Galli is out of bloom. Arenaria serpyllzfolia is out of bloom at Clamshell.? Side-flowering sandwort abundantly out this side of Dugan Spring. Solanum well out, by Wood’s Bridge.

P. M.— To Flint’s Pond.

P. M.— To Conantum on foot. Sophia has sent me, in a letter from Worcester, part of an orchis in bloom, apparently Platanthera Hooker (?), or smaller round-leafed orchis, from the Hermitage Wood, so called, northeast of the town; but the two leaves are elliptical. Utricularia vulgaris was abundantly out yesterday in Everett’s Pool; how long? Sidesaddle- flower numerously out now. Apparently a small pewee nest on apple in Miles’s meadow. Bird on, and not to be frightened off, though I throw sticks and climb the tree to near her.

Friday. To Worcester.

Walk to Hermitage Woods with Sophia and aunts. Uvularia perfoliata very common there; now out of bloom. Rhamnus cathartica, common buck- thorn, naturalized in those woods, now going out of bloom. It is dicecious, twelve feet high, north side. Maple-leaved viburnum out a day or more there appar- ently. Mallows abundantly out in street.

Mrs. Brown reads a letter from John Downs in Philadelphia to Mr. Brown, in which he re- members his early youth in Shrewsbury and the pout accompanied by her young. A Miss Martha Le Barron describes to me a phosphorescence on the beach at night in Narragansett Bay. They wrote their names with some minute creatures on the sand. P. M. — To some woods southwest of Worcester. The moist bass bark just stripped from a sapling swells very like a cucumber. All three of us were struck byit. A night-flowering cereus opens three or four times at a Mrs. Newton’s while I am there. Once it opened at about 9 p. M., and closed and drooped and came to an end like a wet rag wrung out, at daylight. Transient as my mushroom. Was about a foot in diameter, but an ordinary stem, like the turkey’s feet. Diervilla well out.