12 October 1857 – 18 October 1857

P. M. — To Annursnack. The eighth fine day, warmer than the last two. I find one or two house-leek blossoms even yet fresh, and all the rest crisp. The fringed gentian by the brook opposite is in its prime, and also along the north edge of the Painted-Cup Meadows. ‘The stems of the blue vervain, whose flowers and leaves are withered and brown, are nearly as handsome and clear a purple as those of the poke have been, from top to bottom. Looking from the Hill. The autumnal tints gener- ally are much duller now than three or four days ago, or before the last two frosts. I am not sure but the yellow now prevails over the red in the landscape, and even over the green. The general color of the landscape from this hill is now russet, 2. e. red, yellow, etc., mingled. The maple fires are generally about burnt out. Yet I can see very plainly the colors of the sprout- land, chiefly oak, on Fair Haven Hill, about four miles distant, and also yellows on Mt. Misery, five miles off, also on Pine Hill, and even on Mt. Tabor, indistinctly. Eastward, I distinguish red or yellow in the woods as far as the horizon, and it is most distant on that side, — six miles, at least. The huckleberries on Nagog Hill are very red. The smaller and tenderer weeds were in their prime, me- thinks, some weeks ago. ‘They have felt the frosts earlier than the maples and other trees, and are now withered generally. I see a very distant mountain house in a direction a little to the west of Carlisle, and two elms in the hori- zon on the right of it. Measuring carefully on the map of the county, I think it must be the Baptist Church in North Tewksbury, within a small fraction of four- teen miles from me. I think that this is the greatest distance at which I have seen an elm without a glass. There is another elm in the horizon nearly north, but not so far. It looks very much larger than it is. Per- haps it looms a little. The elm, I think, can be distin- guished further than any other tree, and, however faintly seen in the distant horizon, its little dark dome, which the thickness of my nail will conceal, just rising above the line of the horizon, apparently not so big as a prominence on an orange, it suggests ever the same quiet rural and domestic life passing beneath it. It is the vignette to an unseen idyllic poem. Though that little prominence appears so dark there, I know that it is now a rich brownish-yellow canopy of rustling leaves, whose harvest-time is already come, sending down its showers from time to time. Homestead tele- graphs to homestead through these distant elms seen from the hilltops. I fancy I hear the house-dog’s bark and lowing of the cows asking admittance to their yard beneath it. The tea-table is spread; the master and mistress and the hired men now have just sat down in their shirt-sleeves. Some are so lifted up in the horizon that they seem like portions of the earth detached and floating off by themselves into space. Their dark masses against the sky can be seen as far, at least, as a white spire, though it may be taller. Some of these trees, seen through a glass, are not so large. . . . . This was what those scamps did in California. The trees were so grand and venerable that they could not afford to let them grow a hair’s breadth bigger, or live a moment longer to reproach themselves. They were so big that they resolved they should never be bigger. They were so venerable that they cut them right down. It was not for the sake of the wood; it was only because they were very grand and venerable.

P. M.— To Poplar Hill. Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. When my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago. The outside trees in the swamps lose their leaves first. The brilliancy of young oaks, especially scarlet oaks, in sprout-lands is dulled. These red maples and young scarlet oaks, etc., have been the most conspicuous and important colors, or patches of color, in the landscape. Those most brilliant days, then, so far as the autumnal tints are concerned, are over; 2. ¢., when we may be surprised at any turn by the sight of some incredibly bright and dazzling tree or grove of trees. I noticed the first large white oaks wholly changed to a salmon-color, but not brilliant like those sprout- land fires. Are very large oaks never brilliant in their tints ?} | The hickories on Poplar Hill have not lost any of their brilliancy, generally speaking. Some are quite green even. I look down into a mocker-nut, whose recesses and greater part are pure yellow, and from this you pass through a ruddy orange in the more ex- posed leaves to a rich crispy brown in the leaves of the extreme twigs about the clusters of round green nuts. The red of oaks, etc., is far more general now than three or four days ago, but it is also much duller, so that some maples that were a bright scarlet can now hardly be distinguished by their color from oaks, which have just turned red. The Great Fields from this hill are pale-brown, often hoary — there is not yellow enough for russet — pastures, with very large red or purple patches of black- berry vines. You can only appreciate the effect of these by a strong and peculiar intention of the eye. We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there. The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow, 7. e. north side the hill, are at the height of their change and are falling. Maybe they are later than on the south side of hills. They are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground. | Pinweeds are brown; how long? Some of the large ash trees, both a black and white, are quite bare of leaves already. With the red maples, then. Looking from this hill, green begins to look as rare and interesting as any color, — you may say begins to be a color by itself, —and I distinguish green streaks and patches of grass on most hillsides.

P. M. — To White Pond. Another, the tenth of these memorable days. We have had some fog the last two or three nights, and this forenoon it was slow to disperse, dog-day-like, but this afternoon it is warmer even than yesterday. I should like it better if it were not so warm. I am glad to reach the shade of Hubbard’s Grove; the coolness is refreshing. It is indeed a golden autumn. These ten days are enough to make the reputation of any climate. A tradition of these days might be handed down to posterity. They deserve a notice in history, in the history of Concord. All kinds of crudities have a chance to get ripe this year. Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. ‘The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sand-banks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines. You may run upon them as much as you please,;— even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content. You may see them on change any warmer hour. In these banks, too, and such as these, are my funds deposited, a fund of health and enjoyment. Their (the crickets) prosperity and hap- piness and, I trust, mine do not depend on whether ~ the New York banks suspend or no. We do not rely on such slender security as the thin paper of the Suffolk Bank. To put your trust in such a bank is to be swal- lowed up and undergo suffocation. Invest, I say, in these country banks. Let your capital be simplicity and contentment. Withered goldenrod (Solidago nemo- ralis) is no failure, like a broken bank, and yet in its most golden season nobody counterfeits it. Nature needs no counterfeit-detector. I have no compassion for, nor sympathy with, this miserable state of things. Banks built of granite, after some Grecian or Roman style, with their porticoes and their safes of iron, are not so permanent, and cannot give me so good security for capital invested in them, as the heads of withered hardhack in the meadow. I do not suspect the solvency of these. I know who is their president and cashier. I take all these walks to every point of the compass, and it is always harvest-time with me. I am always gathering my crop from these woods and fields and waters, and no man is in my way or interferes with me. My crop is not their crop. To-day I see them gather- ing in their beans and corn, and they are a spectacle to me, but are soon out of my sight. I am not gather- ing beans and corn. Do they think there are no fruits but such as these? I am a reaper; I am not a gleaner. I go reaping, cutting as broad a swath as I can, and bundling and stacking up and carrying it off from field to field, and no man knows nor cares. My crop is not sorghum nor Davis seedlings. There are other crops than these, whose seed is not distributed by the Patent Office. I go abroad over the land each day to get the best I can find, and that is never carted off even to the last day of November, and I do not go as a gleaner. The farmer has always come to the field after some material thing; that is not what a philosopher goes there for. I see, in Hubbard’s Grove, a large black birch at the very height of its change. Its leaves a clear, rich yellow; many strew the ground. Near by is a tupelo which is all a distinct yellow with a little green. Within a couple of rods a single hyla peeps interruptedly, bird- like. Large oaks appear to be now generally turned or turning. The white, most conspicuous in sunny places, say a reddish salmon; began to change at lower limbs. Black oaks a brownish yellow. These large trees are not brilliant. On the causeway I pass by maples here and there which are bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on one side on the ground, making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I should rather say that I first observed the trees thus flat on the ground like a permanent colored and substantial shadow, and they , 1857) THE FALL OF THE PINE LEAVES 95 alone suggested to look for the trees that had borne them. They preserve these bright colors on the ground but a short time, a day or so, especially if it rains.’ see a large flock of grackles, probably young birds, quite near me on William Wheeler’s apple trees, prun- ing themselves and trying to sing. They never suc- ceed; make a sort of musical spluttering. Most, I think, have brownish heads and necks, and some purple re- flections from their black bodies. There is a very little gossamer, mostly blowing off in large loops from the south side the bridge, the loose end having caught. I also see it here and there stretched across lanes from side to side, as high as my face. Sat in the old pasture beyond the Corner Spring Woods to look at that pine wood now at the height of its change, pitch and white. Their change produces a very singular and pleasing effect. They are regularly parti-colored. The last year’s leaves, about a foot be- neath the extremities of the twigs on all sides, now changed and ready to fall, have their period of bright- ness as well as broader leaves. They are a clear yellow, contrasting with the fresh and liquid green of the termi- nal plumes, or this year’s leaves. These two quite dis- tinct colors are thus regularly and equally distributed over the whole tree. You have the warmth of the yellow and the coolness of the green. So it should be with our own maturity, not yellow to the very extremity of our shoots, but youthful and untried green ever putting forth afresh at the extremities, foretelling a maturity as yet unknown. The ripe leaves fall to the ground and become nutriment for the green ones, which still aspire to heaven. In the fall of the leaf, there is no fruit, there is no true maturity, neither in our science and wis- dom. Some aspens are a very fair yellow now, and trem- bling as in summer. I think it is they I see a mile off on Bear Garden Hill, amid the oaks and pines. There is a very thick haze this afternoon and al- most a furnace-like heat. I cannot see far toward the sun through it. Approaching White Pond by the path, I see on its perfectly smooth surface what I at first mistake for a large raft of dead and black logs and limbs, but it soon elevates itself in the form of a large flock of black ducks, which go off with a loud quacking. This, as other ponds now, when it is still, has a fine sparkle from skaters on it. I go along near the shore in the woods to the hill recently cleared on the east side. The clethra as an under-bush has an exceed- ingly pale yellow leaf. The nemopanthes on the hill- side is like the amelanchier, yellowish with consider- able ruddiness; the total effect is russet. Looking now toward the north side of the pond, I perceive that the reflection of the hillside seen from an opposite hill is not so broad as the hillside itself appears, owing to the different angle at which it is seen. The reflection exhibits such an aspect of the hill, appar- ently, as you would get if your eye were placed at that part of the surface of the pond where the reflection seems to be. In this instance, too, then, Nature avoids repeat- ing herself. Not even reflections in still water are like their substances as seen by us. This, too, accounts for my seeing portions of the sky through the trees in reflec- tions often when none appear in the substance. Is the reflection of a hillside, however, such an aspect of it as can be obtained by the eye directed to the hill itself from any single point of view? It plainly is not such a view as the eye would get looking upward from the imme- diate base of the hill or water’s edge, for there the first rank of bushes on the lower part of the hill would con- ceal the upper. The reflection of the top appears to be such a view of it as I should get with my eye at the water’s edge above the edge of the reflection; but would the lower part of the hill also appear from this point as it does in the reflection? Should I see as much of the under sides of the leaves there ? If not, then the reflection Is never a true copy or repetition of its substance, but a new composition, and this may be the source of its novelty and attractiveness, and of this nature, too, may be the charm of an echo. I doubt if you can ever get Nature to repeat herself exactly. The occasional dimples on this pure sheeny surface in which the sky is reflected make you suspect as soon some mote fallen from the sky as risen from beneath, to disturb it. Next to the scarlet, methinks the white shrub oaks make, or have made, the most brilliant show at a dis- tance on hillsides. The latter is not very bright, unless seen between you and the sun, but there its abundant inward color is apparent. At the head of the path by the pond, I saw a red squirrel, only a rod off in a white pine, eating a toad- stool. It was a slightly convex white disk, (then) two inches in diameter. I saw where he had bitten off its white stump within a few feet of the base of the tree. I should not have called it an edible one; but he knows. He held it vertically with a paw on each side and what had been the lower side toward him, and was nibbling off the inside edge very fast, turning it round from time to time and letting some fragments drop, pausing to look at me. As a boy might nibble a biscuit. Are nuts scarce? I think it was not the edible one; was too big. Veronica serpyllifolia in bloom.

Rain at last, and end of the remarkable days. The springs and rivers have been very low. Mill- ers have not water enough to grind their grists. There has been a great fall of leaves in the night on account of this moist and rainy weather; but hardly yet that touch that brings down the rock maple. The streets are thickly strewn with elm and buttonwood and other leaves, feuille-morte color. Some elms and butter- nuts are quite bare. Yet the sugar maples in our streets are now in their prime and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints, while some white maples by the river are nearly bare. I see, too, that all locusts did not become crisp and fall before this without acquiring a bright color. In the churchyard they are unwithered, just turning a pale yellow. How many plants are either yellow or scarlet! Not only maples, but rose bushes, hazel bushes, etc., etc. Rue is a conspicuous pale yel- low for a weed.! I saw the other day a cricket standing on his head in a chocolate-colored (inside) fungus, only his tail-yards visible. He had sunk a well an inch deep, and was even then sinking it, perpendicularly, unconscious of what was going on above. The ten days — at least — before this were plainly Indian summer. They were remarkably pleasant and warm. The latter half I sat and slept with an open window, though the first part of the time I had a little fire in the morning. These succeeded to days when you had worn thick clothing and sat by fires for some time. Our staghorn sumach has just become a very rich scarlet. So, apparently, has the large one at Mrs. Sim- monds’s. They are later than the others; a yellower scarlet, almost orange. It is another example of the oddity of the Orientals that yellow “is in the east a regal color, more especially so in China, where it is exclusively royal.” (Field on Colors, 139.) Further west it was purple, regal and im- perial. The river lower this morning than before this year. Concord Bank has suspended.

Friday. P. M. — Up Assabet. It clears up entirely by noon, having been cloudy in the forenoon, and is as warm as before now. I stop a while at Cheney’s shore to hear an incessant musical twittering from a large flock of young goldfinches which have dull-yellow and drab and black plumage, on maples, etc., while the leaves are falling. Young birds can hardly restrain themselves, and if they did not leave us, might perchance burst forth into song in the later Indian- summer days. I see dwarf cornel leaves on the hemlock bank, some green, some bright crimson. ‘The onoclea has faded whiter still. Hemlock leaves are falling now faster than ever, and the trees are more parti-colored. The falling leaves look pale-yellow on the trees, but become reddish on the ground. The large poplar (P. grandideniata) is now at the height of its change, — clear yellow, but many leaves have fallen. The ostrya still holds its leaves. It is about the color of the elm at its height. I see red oaks now turned various colors, — red-brown or yellow-brown or scarlet-brown,— not commonly bright. The swamp white are greener yet. Melvin is fishing for pickerel. ‘Thinks this the best day for fishing we have had this long time; just wind enough. Says there are some summer ducks up the stream, the same I saw here the other day. Thinks they are here after acorns. He once caught seven summer ducks by baiting his steel traps with acorns under water. They dove for them, and he caught them by the neck. He saw yesterday a green chestnut bur on the Great Meadows (now bare), fifty rods from the Holt. Could not tell how it came there. Am surprised to find an abundance of witch-hazel, now at the height of its change, where S. Wheeler cut off, at the bend of the Assabet. The tallest bushes are bare, though in bloom, but the lowest are full of leaves, many of them green, but chiefly clear and handsome yellow of various shades, from a pale lemon in the shade or within the bush to a darker and warmer yellow with- out. Some are even a hue of crimson; some green, with bright yellow along the veins. This reminds me that, generally, plants exposed turn early, or not at all, while the same species in the shade of the woods at a much later date assume very pure and delicate tints, as more withdrawn from the light. You notice now many faded, almost white dicksonia ferns, and some brakes about as white. A great part of the pine-needles have just fallen. See the carpet of pale-brown needles under this pine. How light it lies up on the grass, and that great rock, and the wall, resting thick on its top and its shelves, and on the bushes and underwood, hanging lightly! They are not yet flat and reddish, but a more delicate pale brown, and lie up light as joggle-sticks just dropped. ‘The ground is nearly concealed by them. How beautifully they die, making cheerfully their annual contribution to the soil! They fall to rise again; as if they knew that it was not one annual deposit alone that made this mch mould in which pine trees grow. They live in the soil whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the for- ests that spring from it. The leaves that were floating before the rain have now sunk to the bottom, being wetted above as well as below. I see a delicate pale brown-bronze wood frog. I think I can always take them up in my hand. They, too, vary in color, like the leaves of many species of plants at present, having now more yellow, now more red; and perhaps for the same reason. I saw some blackbirds, apparently grackles, singing, ‘ after their fashion, on a tree by the river. Most had those grayish-brown heads and necks; some, at least, much ferruginous or reddish brown reflected. They were pruning themselves and splitting their throats in vain, trying to sing as the other day. All the melody flew off in splinters.‘ Also a robin sings once or twice, Just as in spring!

Saturday. Very high wind in the night, shak- ing the house. I feel it taking hold under the eaves, which project at the end of the house, each time with a jerk. Some rain also, and these two bring down the leaves. A great many more ash trees, elms, etc., are bare now. What a new beauty the blue of the river acquires, seen at a distance in the midst of the various-tinted woods, great masses of red and yellow, etc.! It appears as color, which ordinarily it does not, — elysian. The trainers are out with their band of music, and I find my account in it, though I have not subscribed for it. I am walking with a hill between me and the soldiers. I think, perhaps, it will be worth the while to keep within hearing of these strains this afternoon. Yet I hesitate. I am wont to find music unprofitable; it is a luxury. It is surprising, however, that so few habitually intoxicate themselves with music, so many with alcohol. I think, perchance, I may risk it, it will whet my senses so; it will reveal a glory where none was seen before. It is remarkable that men too must dress in bright colors and march to music once in the’ year. Nature, too, assumes her bright hues now, and think you a subtile music may not be heard amid the hills? No doubt these strains do sometimes suggest to Abner, walking behind in his red-streaked pants, an ideal which he had lost sight of, or never perceived. It is remarkable that our insti- tutions can stand before music, it is so revolutionary. P. M. — To Clintonia Swamp. Glossy-brown white oak acorns strew the ground thickly, many of them sprouted. How soon they have sprouted! I find some quite edible, but they too, like wild apples, require an outdoor appetite. I do not ad- mit their palatableness when I try them in the house. Is not the outdoor appetite the one to be prayed for? The cinnamon ferns surrounding the swamp have just lost their leafets, except the terminal ones. They have acquired their November aspect, and the wool now adheres to my clothes as I go through them. The protected ones are not yet bare. The dicksonia ferns are killed sere and brown where exposed, but in woods are still pretty green even, only some faded white. They grow in patches. The swamp floor is covered with red maple leaves, many yellow with bright-scarlet spots or streaks. Small brooks are almost concealed by them. The Lycopodium lucidulum looks suddenly greener amid the withered leaves.' 7 It is cooler to-day, and a fire is necessary, which I have not had for about a week. The mountains are more distinct in the horizon, and as I come home the sunset sky is white and cold; recently it was a warm orange (?) tint.

P.M. — To Conantum. Clear and pleasant afternoon, but cooler than before. At the brook beyond Hubbard’s Grove, I stand to watch the water-bugs (Gyrinus). The shallow water appears now more than usually clear there, as the weather is cooler, and the shadows of these bugs on the bottom, half a dozen times as big as themselves, are very dis- tinct and interesting, with a narrow and well-defined halo about them. But why are they composed, as it were, of two circles run together, the foremost largest? Is it owing to the manner in which the light falls on their backs, in two spots? You think that the insect must be amused with this pretty shadow. I also see plainly the shadows of ripples they make, which are scarcely per- ceptible on the surface. Many alders and birches just bare. I should say that the autumnal change and brightness of foliage began fairly with the red maples (not to speak of a very few premature trees in water) September 25th, and ends this year, say generally October 22d, or maybe two or three days earlier. The fall of the leaf, in hke way, began fairly with the fall of the red maple leaves, October 13th, and ended at least as early as when the pitch pines had generally fallen, November 5th (the larches are about a week later). The red maples are now fairly bare, though you may occasionally see one full of leaves. So gradually the leaves fall, after all, — though in- dividuals will be completely stripped in one short windy rain-storm, — that you scarcely miss them out of the landscape; but the earth grows more bare, and the fields more hoary, and the heavy shadows that began in June take their departure, November being at hand. I go along the sunny west side of the Holden wood. Snakes lie out now on sunny banks, amid the dry leaves, now as in spring. ‘They are chiefly striped ones. They crawl off a little into the bushes, and rest there half-concealed till I am gone. The bass and the black ash are completely bare; how long? Red cedar is fallen and falling. Looking across to the sprout-land beneath the Cliffs, I see that the pale brown of withered oak leaves begins to be conspicuous, amid the red, in sprout-lands. In Lee’s Wood, white pine leaves are now fairly fallen (not pitch pine yet),—a pleasant, soft, but slippery carpet to walk on. They sometimes spread leafy twigs on floors. Would not these be better? Where the pines stand far apart on grassy pasture hillsides, these tawny patches under each tree contrast singu- larly with the green around. I see them under one such tree completely and evenly covering and conceal- ing the grass, and more than an inch deep, as they lie lightly. ‘These leaves, like other, broader ones, pass through various hues (or shades) from green to brown, — first yellow, giving the tree that parti-colored look, then pale brown when they fall, then reddish brown after lying on the ground, and then darker and darker brown when decaying. I see many robins on barberry bushes, probably after berries. The red oaks I see to-day are full of leaves, —a brownish yellow (with more or less green, but no red or scarlet). I find an abundance of those small, densely clustered grapes, — not the smallest quite, — still quite fresh and full on green stems, and leaves crisp but not all fallen; so much later than other grapes, which were further advanced October 4th when it was too late to get many. These are not yet ripe and may fairly be called frost grapes. Half-way up Black- berry Steep, above the rock. The huckleberries on Conantum appear to have been softened and spoilt by the recent rain, for they are quite thick still on many bushes. ‘Their leaves have fallen. So many leaves have now fallen in the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a nut without being heard. As I was returning over Hubbard’s stump fence pasture, I heard some of the common black field crick- ets ' (three quarters of an inch long), two or three rods before me, make, as I thought, a peculiar shrilling, like a clear and sharp twittering of birds, [so] that I looked up for some time to see a flock of small birds going over, but they did not arrive. These fellows were, one or two, at the mouth of their burrows, and as I stood over one I saw how he produced the sound, by very slightly lifting his wing-cases (if that is the name of them), and shuffling them (transversely of course) over each other about an eighth of an inch, perhaps three or four times, and then stopping. Thus they stand at the mouths of their burrows, in the warm pastures, near the close of the year, shuffling their wing-cases over each other (the males only), and pro- duce this sharp but pleasant creaking sound, — help- ing to fetch the year about. Thus the sounds of human industry and activity —the roar of cannon, blasting of rocks, whistling of locomotives, rattling of carts, tinkering of artisans, and voices of men — may sound to some distant ear like an earth-song and the creak- ing of crickets. The crickets keep about the mouths of their burrows as if apprehending cold. The fringed gentian closes every night and opens every morning in my pitcher. ' Acheta abbreviata.