19 October 1857 – 25 October 1857

Mr. Sanborn tells me that he looked off from Wachusett last night, and that he saw the shadow of the mountain gradually extend itself eastward not only over the earth but finally on to the sky in the hori- zon. ‘Thought it extended as much as two diameters of the moon on to the sky, in a small cone. This was like the spectre of the Brocken. Harris says the crickets produce their shrilling by shuffling their wing-covers together lengthwise. I should have said it was sidewise, or transversely to the in- sect’s length, as I looked down on it. You may see these crickets now everywhere in the ruts, as in the cross-road from the Turnpike to the Great Road, creeping along, or oftenest three or four together, ab- sorbed in feeding on, 7. e. sucking the juices of, a crushed companion. ‘There are two broad ruts made by ox-carts loaded with muck, and a cricket has been crushed or wounded every four or five feet in each. It is one long slaughter-house. But as often as a cart goes by, the survivors each time return quickly to their seemingly luscious feast. At least two kinds there.

P. M. — To the Easterbrooks Country. I go along the riverside and by Dakin the pump- maker’s. There is a very strong northwest wind, Novemberish and cool, raising waves on the river and admonishing to prepare for winter. I see two Chenopodium album with stems as bright purple and fair as the poke has been, and the calyx- lobes enveloping the seeds the same color. Apples are gathered; only the ladders here and there, left leaning against the trees. I had gone but little way on the old Carlisle road when I saw Brooks Clark, who is now about eighty and bent like a bow, hastening along the road, bare- footed, as usual, with an axe in his hand; was in haste perhaps on account of the cold wind on his bare feet. It is he who took the Centinel so long. When he got up to me, I saw that besides the axe in one hand, he had his shoes in the other, filled with knurly apples and a dead robin. He stopped and talked with me a few moments; said that we had had a noble autumn and might now expect some cold weather. I asked if he had found the robin dead. No, he said, he found it with its wing broken and killed it. He also added that he had found some apples in the woods, and as he had n’t anything to carry them in, he put ’em in his shoes. They were queer-looking trays to carry fruit in. How many he got in along toward the toes, I don’t know. I noticed, too, that his pockets were stuffed with them. His old tattered frock coat was hanging in strips about the skirts, as were his pantaloons about his naked feet. He appeared to have been out on a scout this gusty afternoon, to see what he could find, as the youngest boy might. It pleased me to see this cheery old man, with such a feeble hold on life, bent almost double, thus enjoying the evening of his days. Far be it from me to call it avarice or penury, this childlike delight in finding something in the woods or fields and carrying it home in the October evening, as a trophy to be added to his winter’s store. Oh, no; he was happy to be Nature’s pensioner still, and bird- like to pick up his living. Better his robin than your turkey, his shoes full of apples than your barrels full; they will be sweeter and suggest a better tale. He can afford to tell how he got them, and we to listen. There is an old wife, too, at home, to share them and hear how they were obtained. Like an old squirrel] shuf- fling to his hole with a nut. Far less pleasing to me the loaded wain, more suggestive of avarice and of spir- itual penury. This old man’s cheeriness was worth a thousand of the church’s sacraments and memento mori’s. It was better than a prayerful mood. It proves to me old age as tolerable, as happy, as infancy. I was glad of an occasion to suspect that this afternoon he had not been at ‘“‘work” but living somewhat after my own fashion (though he did not explain the axe), — had been out to see what nature had for him, and now was hasten- ing home to a burrow he knew, where he could warm his old feet. If he had been a young man, he would probably have thrown away his apples and put on his shoes when he saw me coming, for shame. But old age is manlier; it has learned to live, makes fewer apologies, like infancy. This seems a very manly man. I have known him within a few years building stone wall by himself, barefooted. I keep along the old Car- lisle road. The leaves having mostly fallen, the country now seems deserted, and you feel further from home and more lonely. I see where squirrels, apparently, have gnawed the apples left in the road. The barberry bushes are now alive with, I should say, thousands of robins feeding on them. They must make a prin- cipal part of their food now. I see the yellowish elec- tion-cake fungi. Those large chocolate-colored ones have been burst some days (at least). Warren Brown, who owns the Easterbrooks place, the west side the road, is picking barberries. Allows that the soil thereabouts is excellent for fruit, but it is so rocky that he has not patience to plow it. That is the reason this tract is not cultivated. The yellow birches are generally bare. The sassafras in Sted But- trick’s pasture near to E. Hubbard’s Wood, nearly so; leaves all withered. Much or most of the fever-bush still green, though somewhat wrinkled.' There was Melvin, too, a-barberrying and nutting. He had got two baskets, one in each hand, and his game-bag, which hung from his neck, all full of nuts and barberries, and his mouth full of tobacco. Trust him to find where the nuts and berries grow. He is — hunting all the year and he marks the bushes and the trees which are fullest, and when the time comes, for once leaves his gun, though not his dog, at home, and takes his baskets to the spot. It is pleasanter to me to meet him with his gun or with his baskets than to meet some portly caterer for a family, basket on arm, at the stalls of Quincy Market. Better Melvin’s pignuts than the others’ shagbarks. It is to be ob- served that the best things are generally most abused, and so are not so much enjoyed as the worst. Shag- barks are eaten by epicures with diseased appetites; pignuts by the country boys who gather them. So fagots and rubbish yield more comfort than sound wood. Melvin says he has caught partridges in his hands. If there’s only one hole, knows they’ve not gone out. Sometimes shoots them through the snow. What a wild and rich domain that Easterbrooks Country! Not a cultivated, hardly a cultivatable field in it, and yet it delights all natural persons, and feeds more still. Such great rocky and moist tracts, which daunt the farmer, are reckoned as unimproved land, and therefore worth but little; but think of the miles of huckleberries, and of barberries, and of wild apples, so fair, both in flower and fruit, resorted to by men and beasts; Clark, Brown, Melvin, and the robins, these, at least, were attracted thither this afternoon. There are barberry bushes or clumps there, behind which I could actually pick two bushels of berries with- out being seen by you on the other side. And they are not a quarter picked at last, by all creatures to- gether. I walk for two or three miles, and still the clumps of barberries, great sheaves with their wreaths of scarlet fruit, show themselves before me and on every side, seeming to issue from between the pines or other trees, as if it were they that were promenading there, not I. That very dense and handsome maple and pine grove opposite the pond-hole on this old Carlisle road is Ebby Hubbard’s.*’ Melvin says there are those alive who remember mowing there. Hubbard loves to come with his axe in the fall or winter and trim up his woods. re | | 2 a v = F é +7 CT ca J nae cfs ie ha! ad toy « ie i 1 #. ] - - o- Melvin tells me that Skinner says he thinks he heard a wildcat scream in E. Hubbard’s Wood, by the Close. It is worth the while to have a Skinner in the town; else we should not know that we had wildcats. They had better look out, or he will skin them, for that seems to have been the trade of his ancestors. How long Nature has manceuvred to bring our Skinner within ear-shot of that wildcat’s scream! Saved Ebby’s wood to be the scene of it! Ebby, the wood-saver. Melvin says that Sted sold the principal log of one of those pasture oaks to Garty for ten dollars and got several cords besides. What a mean bribe to take the life of so noble a tree! Wesson is so gouty that he rarely comes out-of-doors, | and is a spectacle in the street; but he loves to tell his old stories still! How, when he was stealing along to get a shot at his ducks, and was just upon them a red squirrel sounded the alarm, chickaree chickaree chickaree, and off they went; but he turned his gun upon the squirrel to avenge himself. It would seem as if men generally could better ap- preciate honesty of the John Beatton stamp, which gives you your due to a mill, than the generosity which habitually throws in the half-cent.

First ice that I’ve seen or heard of, a tenth of an inch thick in yard, and the ground is slightly frozen. I see many myrtle-birds now about the house this forenoon, on the advent of cooler weather. They keep flying up against the house and the window and flut- tering there, as if they would come in, or alight on the wood-pile or pump. They would commonly be mis- taken for sparrows, but show more white when they fly, beside the yellow on the rump and sides of breast seen near to and two white bars on the wings. Chubby birds. P. M. — Up Assabet. Cool and windy. Those who have put it off thus long make haste now to collect what apples were left out and dig their potatoes before the ground shall freeze hard. Now again, as in the spring, we begin to look for sheltered and sunny places where we may sit. I see, hanging over an alder bough above the hem- locks, five inches above the water, a great eel, over two feet long and two inches wide or thick horizontally (more vertically) in the forward part of its body. It must weigh two and a half pounds; the biggest I ever saw. What a repulsive and gluttonous-looking crea- ture, with its vomer made to plow the mud and wallow in filth, and its slimy skin (I had forgotten it was scaly, it is so fine). It was somewhat bloated, perhaps, and its skin distended, but at any rate it had got its skin full. It is more repulsive to me than a snake, and I : think must be less edible. Its dead-white eye-spots — for the eyes were closed flat on its black and shiny vomer —and the fringed gelatinous kind of alga or what-not that covered like a lichen the parts submerged made it yet more repulsive. I cannot go by a large dead swamp white oak log this cool] evening, but with no little exertion get it aboard, and some blackened swamp white oak stumps, whose earthy parts are all gone. I see a robin eating prinos berries. Is not the robin the principal berry-eating bird nowadays? There must be more about the bar- berry bushes in Melvin’s Preserve than anywhere. As I am paddling home swiftly before the northwest wind, absorbed in my wooding, I see, this cool and grayish evening, that peculiar yellow light in the east, from the sun a little before its setting. It has just come out beneath a great cold slate-colored cloud that occupies most of the western sky, as smaller ones the eastern, and now its rays, slanting over the hill in whose shadow I float, fall on the eastern trees and hills with a thin yellow light like a clear yellow wine, but somehow it reminds me that now the hearth-side is getting to be a more comfortable place than out-of-doors. Before I get home the sun has set and a cold white light in the west succeeded. I saw wood tortoises coupled, up the Assabet, the back of the upper above water. It held the lower with its claws about the head, and they were not to be parted. It is pitiful to see a man of sixty, a philosopher, per- chance, inquiring for a bearing apple orchard for sale. If he must have one, why did he not set it out when he was thirty? How mean and lazy, to be plucking the fruit of another man’s labor. The old man I saw yes- terday lives on peaches and milk in their season, but then he planted them. Is not the poet bound to write his own biography? Is there any other work for him but a good journal? We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day. That big swamp white oak limb or tree which I found prostrate in the swamp was longer than my boat and tipped it well. One whole side, the upper, was cov- ered with green hypnum, and the other was partly white with fungi. That green coat adhered when I split it. Immortal wood! that had begun to liveagain. Others burn unfortunate trees that lose their lives prema- turely. ‘These old stumps stand like anchorites and yogees, putting off their earthy garments, more and more sublimed from year to year, ready to be trans- lated, and then they are ripe for my fire. I administer the last sacrament and purification. I find old pitch pine sticks which have lain in the mud at the bottom of the river, nobody knows how long, and weigh them up, — almost as heavy as lead, — float them home, saw and split them. Their pitch, still fat and yellow, has saved them for me, and they burn like candles at last. I become a connoisseur in wood at last, take only the best.

6 a. M. — To Hill. Ground pretty white with frost. The stiffened and frosted weeds and grass have an aggrieved look. The lately free-flowing blades of grass look now like mourn- ing tresses sculptured stiffly in marble; they lie stiff and dishevelled. A very narrow strip of ice has formed along the riverside, in which I see a pad or two, wear- ing the same aggrieved look, like the face of the child that cried for spilt milk, its summer irrevocably gone. Going through the stiff meadow-grass, I collect the particles of white frost on the top of my shoes. Under the ash trees their peculiar club-shaped leaf-stems thickly strew the ground. The bright tints of autumn are now fairly and generally over. Perhaps the brightest trees I see this moment are some aspens. Large oaks are already generally brown. Reddish brown is the prevailing color of deciduous woods. The swamp white oaks are greener than the rest yet. The black willows along the river are about as bare as in November. The button-bushes are completely bare, letting in more light to the water, and these days I see on their stems the ribbed reflections of the waves I have made. Blackbirds go over, chattering, and a small hawk — pigeon or sparrow — glides along and alights on an elm. P. M. — To and round Flint’s Pond. Crossing my old bean-field, I see the blue pond be- tween the green white pines in the field and am re- minded that we are almost reduced to the russet (7. e. pale-brown grass tinged with red blackberry vines) of such fields as this, the blue of water, the green of pines, and the dull reddish brown of oak leaves. The sight of the blue water between the now perfectly green white pines, seen over the light-brown pasture, is pe- culiarly Novemberish, though it may be like this in early spring. As I go through the woods now, so many oak and other leaves have fallen the rustling noise somewhat disturbs my musing. However, Nature in this may have intended some kindness to the ducks, which are now loitering hereabouts on their migration south- ward, mostly young and inexperienced birds, for, as they are feeding [in] Goose Pond, for instance, the rustling of the leaves betrays the approach of the sports- man and his dog, or other foe; so perhaps the leaves on the ground protect them more than when on the trees. There is scarcely a square rod of sand exposed, in this neighborhood, but you may find on it the stone arrowheads of an extinct race. Far back as that time seems when men went armed with bows and pointed stones here, yet so numerous are the signs of it. The finer particles of sand are blown away and the arrow- point remains. The race is as clean gone — from here — as this sand is clean swept by the wind. Such are our antiquities. These were our predecessors. Why, then, make so great ado about the Roman and the Greek, and neglect the Indian? We [need] not wander off with boys in our imaginations to Juan Fernandez, to wonder at footprints in the sand there. Here is a print still more significant at our doors, the print of a race that has preceded us, and i this the little symbol that Nature has transmitted to us. Yes, this arrow-headed character is probably more ancient than any other, and to my mind it has not been deciphered. Men should not go to New Zealand to write or think of Greece and Rome, nor more to New England. New earths, new themes expect us. Celebrate not the Garden of Eden, but your own. I see what I call a hermit thrush on the bushes by the shore of Flint’s Pond; pretty tame. It has an olive- brown back, with a more ferruginous tail, which [is] very narrowly tipped with whitish; an apparently cream-colored throat; and dusky cream-color beneath. The breast is richly spotted with black. The legs are flesh-colored and transparent; the bill black. Yet Wilson says the legs are dusky. Can it be the Turdus olivaceus of Giraud ? Chestnut trees are almost bare. Now is just the time for chestnuts. The white oak generally withers earlier than other large oaks. On the north side of the chest- nut oak hill, in the woods, I see a scarlet oak and even a white one, still almost entirely green! The chestnut oak there is also generally green still, some leaves turned yellow-brown and withering so. Look from the high hill, just before sundown, over the pond. The mountains are a mere cold slate-color. But what a perfect crescent of mountains we have in our northwest horizon! Do we ever give thanks for it? Even as pines and larches and hemlocks grow in communities in the wilderness, so, it seems, do moun- tains love society and form a community in the horizon. Though there may be two or more ranges, one behind the other, and ten or twelve miles between them, yet if the farthest are the highest, they are all seen as one group at this distance. I look up northwest toward my mountains, as a farmer to his hill lot or rocky pasture from his door. I drive no cattle to Ipswich hills. I own no pasture for them there. My eyes it is alone that wander to those blue pastures, which no drought af- fects. They are my flocks and herds. See how they look. They are shaped like tents, inclining to sharp peaks. What is it lifts them upward so? Why not rest level along the horizon? They seem not perfect, they seem not satisfied, until their central parts have curved upward to a sharp summit. They are a succes- sion of pickets with scallops between. That side my pasture is well fenced. ‘This being their upper side, I fancy they must have a corresponding under side and roots also. Might they not be dug up like a tur- nip? Perhaps they spring from seeds which some wind sowed. Can’t the Patent Office import some of the seed of Himmaleh with its next rutabagas? Spore of mountains has fallen there; it came from the gills of an agaric. Ah, I am content to dwell there and see the sun go down behind my mountain fence. It is just about nine miles, as I walk, from here around Flint’s Pond. The hickory leaves, now after they have fallen, are often if not oftenest a dark rich yellow, very conspicu- ous upon the brown leaves of the forest floor, seeming to have more life in them than those leaves which are brown. I saw some hickory sprouts above the per- foliate bellwort near the pond, with very large leaves. One of five leafets had the terminal one fourteen inches long by ten and three quarters wide, and the general leaf-stalk was ten and a half inches long. The leaf-stalk commonly adheres to the leaf when fallen, but in the case of the ash, hickory, and prob- ably other compound leaves, it separates from them and by its singular form puzzles the uninitiated. What a perfect chest the chestnut is packed in! I now hold a green bur in my hand which, round, must have been two and a quarter inches in diameter, from which three plump nuts have been extracted.’ It has a straight, stout stem three sixteenths of an inch in diameter, set on strongly and abruptly. It has gaped in four segments or quarters, revealing the thickness of its walls, from five eighths to three quarters of an inch. With such wonderful care Nature has secluded and defended these nuts, as if they were her most precious fruits, while diamonds are left to take care of them- selves. First it bristles all over with sharp green prickles, some nearly half an inch long, like a hedgehog rolled into a ball; these rest on a thick, stiff, bark-like rind, one sixteenth to one eighth of an inch thick, which, again, is most daintily lined with a kind of silvery fur or velvet plush one sixteenth of an inch thick, even rising in a ridge between the nuts, like the lining of a casket in which the most precious commodities are kept. I see the brown-spotted white cavities where the bases of the nuts have rested and sucked up nour- ishment from the stem. The little stars on the top of the nuts are but shorter and feebler spines which mingle with the rest. They stand up close together, three or more, erecting their tiny weapons, as an infant in the brawny arms of its nurse might put out its own tiny hands, to fend off the aggressor. ‘There is no waste room. The chest is packed quite full; half-developed nuts are the waste paper used in the packing, to fill the vacancies. At last Frost comes to unlock this chest; it alone holds the true key. Its lids straightway gape open, and the October air rushes in, dries the ripe nuts, and then with a ruder gust shakes them all out in a rattling shower down upon the withered leaves. Such is the cradle, thus daintily lined, in which they have been rocked in their infancy. With what steadiness the nuts must be held within these stout arms, — there can be no motion on their base, — and yet how tenderly, by a firm hold that relaxes only as they grow, the walls that confine them, superfluously strong as they seem, expanding as they grow! The chestnut, with its tough shell, looks as if it were able to protect itself, but see how tenderly it has been reared in its cradle before its green and tender skin hardened into a shell. The October air comes in, as I have said, and the light too, and proceed to paint the nuts that clear, handsome reddish (?) brown which we call chestnut. Nowadays the brush that paints chestnuts is very active. It is enterimg into every open bur over the stretching forests’ tops for hundreds of miles, without horse or ladder, and putting on rapid coats of this wholesome color. Otherwise the boys would not think they had got perfect nuts. And that this may be further protected, perchance, both within the bur and afterward, the nuts themselves are partly covered toward the top, where they are first exposed, with that same soft velvety down. And then Nature drops it on the rustling leaves, a done nut, prepared to begin a chestnut’s course again. Within itself, again, each individual nut is lined with a reddish velvet, as if to preserve the seed from jar and injury in falling and, perchance, from sudden damp and cold, and, within that, a thin white skin enwraps the germ. Thus it is lining within lining and unwearied care, — not to count closely, six coverings at least before you reach the contents! But it is a barbarous way to jar the tree, and I trust I do repent of it. Gently shake it only, or let the wind shake it for you. You are gratified to find a nut that has in it no bitterness, altogether palatable.

P. M. — Up Assabet. The ferns which I can see on the bank, apparently all evergreens, are polypody at rock, marginal shield fern, terminal shield fern, and (I think it is) Aspidium spinulosum, which I had not identified. Apparently Aspidium cristatum elsewhere." I can find no bright leaves now in the woods. Witch- hazel, etc., are withered, turned brown, or yet green. See by the droppings in the woods where small migra- ting birds have roosted. I see a squirrel’s nest in a white pine, recently made, on the hillside near the witch-hazels. The high bank-side is mostly covered with fallen leaves of pines and hemlocks, etc. The above-named evergreen ferns are so much the more conspicuous on that pale-brown ground. They stand out all at once and are seen to be evergreen; their character appears. The fallen pine-needles, as well as other leaves, now actually paint the surface of the earth brown in the woods, covering the green and other colors, and the few evergreen plants on the forest floor stand out dis- tinct and have a rare preéminence. Sal Cummings, a thorough countrywoman, conversant with nuts and berries, calls the soapwort gentian “blue vengeance,” mistaking the word. A masculine wild- eyed woman of the fields. Somebody has her daguerreo- type. When Mr. was to lecture on Kansas, she was sure “she wa’n’t going to hear him. None of her folks had ever had any.”

P. M.— To Smith’s chestnut grove. Rain last night, raising the springs a little. To-day and yesterday still, gray days, but not cold. The sugar maple leaves are now falling fast. I get a couple of quarts of chestnuts by patiently brushing the thick beds of leaves aside with my hand in successive concentric circles till I reach the trunk; more than half under one tree. I believe I get more by resolving, where they are reasonably thick, to pick all under one tree first. Begin at the tree and brush the leaves with your right hand in toward the stump, while your left holds the basket, and so go round and round it in concentric circles, each time laying bare about two feet in width, till you get as far as the boughs extend. You may presume that you have got about all then. It is best to reduce it to a system. Of course you will shake the tree first, if there are any on it. The nuts he commonly two or three together, as they fell. I find on a chestnut tree, while shaking it, fifteen or twenty feet high, on the bark of the trunk, a singular green kind of slug nearly half an inch long, of this form, and about three sixteenths high from the paper up, narrower on back, as appears in sketch; a brown mark across middle of back and near tail as drawn (only full). It can elon- gate itself and also run out its head a litle from be- neath this soft kind of shell. Beneath, quite flat and fleshy-ribbed. Climbs up glass slowly but easily. Re- minds me of a green beechnut, but flat-backed. Would hardly suspect it to have hfe at first sight. Sticks very firmly to the bark or glass; hard to be pushed aside. I find one of those small, hard, dark-brown millipede worms partly crawled into a hole in a chestnut. I read of an apple tree in this neighborhood that had blossomed again about a week ago. I find my account in this long-continued monoto- nous labor of picking chestnuts all the afternoon, brushing the leaves aside without looking up, absorbed in that, and forgetting better things awhile. My eye is educated to discover anything on the ground, as chest- nuts, etc. It is probably wholesomer to look at the ground much than at the heavens. As I go stooping and brushing the leaves aside by the hour, I am not thinking of chestnuts merely, but I find myself hum- ming a thought of more significance. This occupa- tion affords a certain broad pause and opportunity to start again afterward, — turn over a new leaf. I hear the dull thump of heavy stones against the trees from far through the rustling wood, where boys are ranging for nuts.

Rain in night. P. M. — By boat to Battle-Ground. A rainy day and easterly wind, — an easterly storm. I see flying very high over the meadow, from the east, eleven large birds, leisurely circling a little by the way, surveying the bare meadow. I think they must be fish hawks. I am amused to see that Varro tells us that the Latin e represents the vowel sound in the bleat of a sheep (Bee). If he had said in any word pronounced by the Romans we should be not the wiser, but we do not doubt that sheep bleat to-day as they did then. The fresh clamshells opened by the musquash be- gin to be conspicuous.